Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.

Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat.... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: "See how I love you."

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

We are united to Him, we are one, and it is when His Passion becomes real to us, through experience and love, that we grow aware of His presence in us.

Christ subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth.

By his own will Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: he was absolutely helpless; he could go nowhere but where she chose to take him; he could not speak; her breathing was his breath; his heart beat in the beating of her heart.... In the seasons of our Advent - waking, working, eating, sleeping, being - each breath is a breathing of Christ into the world.