We just have to recognize life for what it is: a gift to be grateful for, not a property to cling to, hoard, or defend.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.

I loved to teach, I loved my students, but I wanted to find a community. I prayed: "Lord, show me where you want me to go. I will go wanted wherever you call me - but please be clear."

If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning...and ask yourself whether this situation is truly God given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain. To live a disciplined life is to live in such a way that you want only to be where God is with you. The more deeply you live your spiritual life, the easier it will be to discern the difference between living with God and living without God, and the easier it will be to move away from the places where God is no longer with you.

His (Christ's) appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.

Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.

As a general remark, I would say we must move from the moral to the mystical life.