Good families always ritualize the table. You can say, "This is a Christmas meal; this is a birthday meal."

If you feel loved, you can do a thousand things. If you feel rejected, everything becomes a problem.

Hope means to keep living amid desperation and to keep humming in the darkness.

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.

There is nothing so important in the family as the sacred quality of the meal.

Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.

The more I think about the human suffering in our world and my desire to offer a healing response, the more I realize how crucial it is not to allow myself to become paralyzed by feelings of helplessness and guilt. More important than ever is to be very faithful to my vocation to do well the few things I am called to do and hold on to the joy and peace they bring me. I must resist the temptation to let the forces of darkness pull me into despair and make me one more of their many victims.