Jesus goes up onto the mountain, gathers his disciples around him, and says: How blessed are the poor, the gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for uprightness, the merciful, the pure...
It seems indeed that the Church today is one of the few institutions in the world willing to defend human rights regardless of who the oppressor is.
It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget m...
It is important to think about the Church not as over there but as a community of struggling, weak people of whom we are part and in whom we meet our Lord and Redeemer.
In Christ we live as God’s beloved before we were born and after we have died; all the circumstances in between will not negate that. Jean
Ignorance makes us look for acceptance where it cannot be expected, and makes us hope for changes where they cannot be found. Illusion makes us fight for a new world as if we could create and control...
I wonder if the greatest temptation is self-rejection. Could it be that beneath all the lures to greed, lust, and success rests a great fear of never being enough or not being lovable?
I remember a student presenting with great enthusiasm a summary of a book on Zen meditation while his own life experiences of restlessness, loneliness and desire for solitude and quietude remained an...
I asked him how he had been able to take such a splendid picture. With a smile he said, Well, I had only to be very patient and very attentive. It was only after a few hours of compliments that the li...
Here is a home for you; maybe you need us. All my desires to be useful, successful, and productive revolted.
Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life’s hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.
God should be sought, but we cannot find God. We can only be found by him.
Getting answers to my questions is not the goal of the spiritual life. Living in the presence of God is the greater call.
From God’s perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from his throne to run to his returning son...
Do you really want to be converted? Are you willing to be transformed? Or do you keep clutching your old ways of life with one hand while with the other you beg people to for help you change?
Deep spiritual formation is required, involving the whole person—body, mind, and heart. Formation in the mind of Christ, who did not cling to power but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, who...
Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.
But mortification - literally, making death - is what life is all about, a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it w...
Building a vocation on the expectations of concrete results, however conceived, is like building a house on sand instead of on solid rock, and even takes away the ability to accept successes as free g...
As soon as we are alone,...inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, theref...