When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply.
When God looks at our world, God must weep. God must weep because the lust for power has entrapped and corrupted the human spirit. In the news and even in our families and ourselves we see that instea...
We need you to be a father who can claim for himself the authority of true compassion.
Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.
Therefore every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and he who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society.
The distant country is the world in which everything considered holy at home is disregarded.
The more we become sensitive to our own journey the more we realize that we are leaving and coming back every day, every hour. Our minds wander away but eventually return; our hearts leave in search o...
The inward man is faced with a new and often dramatic task: He must come to terms with the inner tremendum. Since the God 'out there' or 'up there' is more or less dissolved in the many secular struct...
The great movement of the spiritual life is from a deaf, nonhearing life to a life of listening.
The gospel proclaims human freedom and dignity more than human enslavement and depravity. What is needed is a balance of biblical values and emphasis on the empowering quality of the gospel. The spiri...
Setting our hearts on something involves not only serious aspiration but also strong determination. A spiritual life requires human effort. The forces that keep pulling us back into a worry-filled lif...
People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness its...
Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be worldly and our life Eucharistic.
Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person to whom you gave it.
Letters of friends are good to receive, but we should be able to live happily without them. Visits are gifts to be valued, but without them we should not fall into the temptation of a brooding mood. P...
Just as words lose their power when they are not born out of silence, so openness loses its meaning when there is no ability to be closed.
Just as in the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus expresses here the great desire of his Father to offer his children a banquet and his eagerness to get it going even when those who are invited refuse...
Jesus says to Nicodemus, though the light has come into the world, people have preferred darkness to the light (John 3:19). In me I can feel this strange preference for the darkness. It seems as if I...
It is not enough for the priests and ministers of the future to be moral people, well trained, eager to help their fellow humans, and able to respond creatively to the burning issues of their time. Al...
I now see that the hands that forgive, console, heal, and offer a festive meal must become my own.