Any life lived attentively is disillusioning as it forces us to know us as we are.

When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.

One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.

Over and over again mediocrity is promoted because real worth isn't to be found.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.

I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.