We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.

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.

Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.

Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship. . . .It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.

The kind of "blind obedience" once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure.

In our dreams lies our unfinished work for the world.

We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.