Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.

Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.

The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.

Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.