To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.

God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God's, that will comfort them.

Really living like Christ will not mean reward, social recognition, and an assured income, but difficulties, discrimination, solitude, anxiety. Here, too, the basic experience of the cross applies: the wider we open our hearts to others, the more audibly we intervene against the injustice that rules over us, the more difficult our lives in the rich unjust society will become.

For me as a woman pride is not really sin, but rather something that I still have to learn. The male conception of the person who rebels against God by affirming himself, by acting proudly, arrogantly, and without constraints, is not a woman's concern. Rather, we women are in danger of not developing any pride, of never becoming independent, of constantly remaining within too narrow boundaries.

Death is what takes place within us when we look upon others not as gift, blessing, or stimulus but as threat, danger, competition.

To take sides with life and experience how we can transcend ourselves is a process that has many names and faces. Religion is one of those names.

Religion does not confirm that there are hungry people in the world; it interprets the hungry to be our brethren whom we allow to starve.