To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.

Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

When I could no longer cling to my normal supports I discovered that true support and real safety lie far beyond the structures of our world.

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

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

I don't pray enough, but I pray more now. Every morning at six o'clock have a half hour of meditation before the Blessed Sacrament. I pray with others too.

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.