It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.
Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That’s a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.
We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn’t prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It’s what’s inside of us, not what’s outside of us that counts.
It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility – and the morality – of the church itself.
Only ideas keep ideas flowing. When we close our minds to what is new, simply because we decide not to bother with it, we close our minds to our responsibility to ourselves – and to others – to keep on growing.
The purpose of leadership is not to make the present bearable. The purpose of leadership is to make the future possible.
But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.
I begin to understand as never before that holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.
An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.
To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.
Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that’s true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.
We don’t change as we get older – we just get to be more of what we’ve always been.
Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.
A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.
Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.
Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.
Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.
Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us.
To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not “coming.” Heaven is here.