Silence is a very concrete, practical, and useful discipline in all our ministerial tasks. It can be seen as a portable cell taken with us from the solitary place into the midst of our ministry. Silence is solitude practiced in action.

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation.

As long as we relate to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the fields and the oceans as properties which we can manipulate according to our real or fabricated needs, nature remains opaque, and does not reveal to us its true being.

That's prayer to let God's Word speak deep within you and tell you, "You are my beloved. You don't have to take an eye for an eye. No, no you're too rich for that."

A few years ago I met an old professor at the University of Notre Dame. Looking back on his long life of teaching, he said with a funny wrinkle in his eyes: I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work.