The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it
Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.
People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.
Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.
In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.
Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.
Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.
When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.
a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.
Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led into places where we would rather not go.
Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for a change of heart.
First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.
We are not what we do, we are not what we have, we are not what others think of us. Coming home is claiming the truth. I am the beloved child of a loving creator.
The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.
Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.
A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.
If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that’s quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way
A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity.
It wasn’t that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and so refocused my whole attention.
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose,” (pp. 49).