As long as our loneliness brings us together with the hope that together we no longer will be alone, we castigate each other with our unfulfilled and unrealistic desires for oneness, inner tranquility...
Aren't you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: 'May this book, idea, course, trip, j...
A large part of the father’s life had been spent waiting. He could not force his younger son to come home or his older son to let go of his resentments. Only they themselves could take the initiative...
A friend once wrote: Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.
People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it
The fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
It is precisely in this continuous process of confession and forgiveness that we are liberated from our isolation and encounter the possibility of a new disarmed way of living. Christians are peacemak...
A much deeper human darkness: the darkness of not feeling truly welcome in human existence.
Your pain is deep, and it won’t just go away. It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences.Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded pa...
You keep listening to those who seem to reject you. But they never speak about you. They speak about their own limitations. They confess their poverty in the face of your needs and desires. They simpl...
You have to live through your pain gradually and thus deprive it of its power over you. Yes, you must go into the place of your pain, but only when you have gained some new ground. When you enter your...
When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give.
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 often say, I am not very happy. I am not content with the way my life is going. I am not really joyful or peaceful. But I don’t know how things can be different, and I guess I have to be realistic...
We need you to be a father who can claim for himself the authority of true compassion.
We might be competent in many subjects, but we cannot become an expert in the things of God. God is greater than our minds and cannot be caught within the boundaries of our finite concepts. Thus, spir...
Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the fullest in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
Trust in God allows us to live with active expectation, not cynicism.