Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.
For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women and men to be loved.
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.
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.
A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.
Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Ministry is the least important thing. You cannot not minister if you are in communion with God and live in community.
The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
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.
To give someone a blessing is the most significant affirmation we can offer.
I have an increasing sense that the most important crisis of our time is spiritual and that we need places where people can grow stronger in the spirit and be able to integrate the emotional struggles in their spiritual journeys.
Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.
Ministers are powerless people who have nothing to boast of except their weaknesses. But when the Lord whom they serve fills them with His blessing they will move mountains and change the hearts of people wherever they go.
Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.
In their poverty, the mentally handicapped reveal God to us and hold us close to the gospel.
God wants you to live for others and to live that presence well.
People with handicaps teach me that being is more important than doing, the heart is more important than the mind, and caring together is better than caring alone.
The spiritual life is not a life before, after, or beyond our everyday existence. No, the spiritual life can only be real when it is lived in the midst of the pains and joys of the here and now.
Peacemaking is a full-time vocation that includes each member of God's people.
Our inclination is to show our Lord only what we feel comfortable with. But the more we dare to reveal our whole trembling self to him, the more we will be able to sense that his love, which is perfect love, casts out all our fears.
