To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul . . . because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.
The incarnation began with Jesus and it has never stopped . . . God takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God's many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down, so that our human eyes can see him.
The highest compliment we can give to God, our Creator, is to thoroughly enjoy the gift of life. One should never look a gift universe in the mouth! The best way to pay for a beautiful moment is to enjoy it.
Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.
Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things.
A healthy soul must do two things for us. First, it must put some fire in our veins, keep us energized, vibrant, living with zest and full of hope as we sense that life is, ultimately beautiful and worth living ... Second, a healthy soul has to keep us fixed together. It has to continually give us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this.
This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That's the litmus test of love.
It is no easy task to walk this earth and find peace. Inside of us, it would seem, something is at odds with the very rhythm of things and we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, and aching. We are so overcharged with desire that it is hard to come to simple rest. Desire is always stronger than satisfaction.
The word baptism means derailment. Christ baptizes Peter on the rock when he tells him: "Because you confessed your love for me, your life is no longer your own. Before you said this, you fastened your belt and you walked wherever you liked. Now, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go." To submit to love is to be baptized, that is, to let one's life be forever interrupted. To not let one's life be interrupted is to say no to love
We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along.
We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.
Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.
Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth.
Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.
You feel your own life - your heart, your mind, your body, your sexuality, the people and things you are connected to - and you spontaneously fill with the exclamation: "God, it feels great to be alive!" That's delight.
Resiliency is the key to love.
Without making any moral judgements whatsoever, one can say that self-indulgence and excessive self-preoccupation are the antithesis of genuine awareness.
The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.
