The people who most affected me were the ones who got right in there with me, who cried with me, but who also had a certain authority, who dared to say what needed saying.

Jesus' whole life and mission involve accepting powerlessness and revealing in this powerlessness the limitlessness of God's love. Here we see what compassion means. It is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is not a reaching out from on high to those who are less fortunate below; it is not a gesture of sympathy or pity for those who fail to make it in the upward pull. On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful.

In solitude we become aware that we were together before we came together and that life is not a creation of our will but rather an obedient response to the reality of our being united.

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.

To forgive another from the heart is an act of liberation. We set that person free from the negative bonds that exist between us. As long as we do not forgive we pull them with us, or worse, as a heavy load. The great temptation is to cling in anger to our enemies & then define ourselves as being offended & wounded by them. Forgiveness, therefore, liberates not only the other but also ourselves. It is the way to the freedom of the children of God.