Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other.

Just when summer gets perfect-fresh nights, soft sun, casual breezes, crushingly full and quietly cooling trees, empty beaches, and free weekends- it ends. Life is like that too. Just when we get it right, it starts to change. The job gets easy and we know just how to do it, and they tell us we're retired. The children grow up and get reasonable and they leave home, just when it's nice to have them around. . . . That's life on the edge of autumn. And that's beautiful-if we have the humility for it.

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.

Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.

When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.

It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.