When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved". Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence -- priceless and irreplaceable.

The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love.

If I were to let my life be taken over by what is urgent, I might very well never get around to what is essential.

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.

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