The pain that comes from deep love makes your love more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root.

Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.

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