Lent is the time for trimming the soul and scrapping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord we have the stamina to yes to its twists and turns with faith and hope. Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be.

Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step towards dismantling the barriers of the world. Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time.

Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that's in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.

Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.

Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.

The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.

Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.