The root of all our personal and emotional difficulties is a lack of togetherness... I therefore believe that the surest route to overcoming problems and becoming the people we were meant to be is reconnecting with God and with our community.

The degree to which we openly express our feelings should be governed, not by fear of reprisal, but by our commitment to loving others.

The more clearly we recognize how deep our commitment to self-protection operates in our relational style and the more courageously we face the ugliness of protecting ourselves rather than loving others, the more we'll shift our direction.

A vision we give to others of who and what they could become has power when it echoes what the spirit has already spoken into their souls.

Maturity involves two elements: 1) immediate obedience in specific situations and 2) long-range character growth.

We have made a terrible mistake! For most of this century we have wrongly defined soul wounds as psychological disorders and delegated their treatment to trained specialists. Damaged psyches aren't the problem. The problem is disconnected souls. What we need is connection. What we need is a healing community.

Led by myself and two colleagues, the course offers a newly developed model of spiritual direction that draws on both the age-old wisdom of the church and more recent perspectives. I call it the Passion/Wisdom Model of Spiritual Direction, and I see it as offering the opportunity for our interior worlds and supernatural reality to meet.