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

Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just in awe.

Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.

Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. "Success is dangerous," the painter Pablo Picasso said. "One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?

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

To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.