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.

All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.

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

For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we really often mean to say is 'icon,' 'star,' 'hero,' ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human. They give us a taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves.

Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.

In Benedictine spirituality, work is what we do to continue what God wanted done....God goes on creating through us. Consequently a life spent serving God must be a life spent giving to others what we have been given.

If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.