They ask only one question: what is pleasing to the Spirit of God? And as soon as they have heard the sound of the Spirit in the silence and solitude of their hearts, they follow its promptings even i...
There is within you a lamb and a lion. Spiritual maturity is the ability to let lamb and lion lie down together.
There is something beautiful about shyness, even though in our culture shyness is not considered a virtue. On the contrary, we are encouraged to be direct, look people straight in the eyes, tell them...
The parable that Rembrandt painted might well be called The Parable of the Lost Sons. Not only did the younger son, who left home to look for freedom and happiness in a distant country, get lost, but...
The main question is Do you own your pain? As long as you do not own your pain—that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world—the danger exists that you will use the other to seek he...
Still, as long as you keep pointing to the specifics, you will miss the full meaning of your pain. You will deceive yourself into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events had been diffe...
People we meet, some great in the eyes of the world and some almost invisible to the larger society, are often conduits of God’s wisdom.
Our salvation comes from something small, tender, and vulnerable, something hardly noticeable. The Lord, who is the creator of the universe, comes to us in smallness, weakness, and hiddenness.
Our children are our most important guests, who enter into our home, ask for careful attention, stay for a while and then leave to follow their own way. Children are strangers whom we have to get to k...
One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness.
One good way to listen is to listen with a sacred text: a psalm or a prayer, for instance. The Hindu spiritual writer Eknath Easwaran showed me the great value of learning a sacred text by heart and r...
Maybe my own deep-rooted fear to be on my own and alone kept me going from person to person, book to book and school to school, anxiously avoiding the pain of accepting the responsibility for my own l...
Love is not based on the willingness to listen, to understand problems of others, or to tolerate their otherness. Love is based on the mutuality of the confession of our total self to each other.
Life in the Spirit of Jesus is therefore a life in which Jesus’ coming into the world—his incarnation, his death, and resurrection—is lived out by those who have entered into the same obedient relatio...
Jesus, the Son of God, is the man of sorrows, but also the man of complete joy.
Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity- an illusion! Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are ch...
It is far from easy to believe that this is true. Often we go to good men and women with our problems in the secret hope that they will take our burden away from us and free us from our loneliness. Fr...
I know now that I have to speak from eternity into time, from the lasting joy into the passing realities of our short existence in this world, from the house of love into the houses of fear, from God’...
Dorotheus writes: Don’t look for the affection of your neighbor. He who looks for it is troubled when he does not get it. You yourself, however, have to give witness to the love for your neighbor and...
Advent . . . leads to a growing inner stillness and joy allowing me to realize that the One for whom I am waiting has already arrived and speaks to me in the silence of my heart.