In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call.
If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.
The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
To learn patience is not to rebel against every hardship.
Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.
The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection.
Jesus didn’t say, ‘Blessed are those who care for the poor.’ He said, ‘Blessed are we where we are poor, where we are broken.’ It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.
Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.
Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.
To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.
The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don’t see the results.
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.
Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.
Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.
In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.
The real enemies of our life are the ‘oughts’ and the ‘ifs.’ They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.