To look to God is to look to the realm of consciousness that can deliver us from the pain of living.

When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside, and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.

Allowing the pain of personal growth to be a crucible of your spirit-the alchemical grail through which the metal of your former self turns into gold-is one of the highest callings of life. Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At midlife we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.

The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.

There should be an expanded role in this society for every human being. I see an expanded role for the human spirit, for excellence, for virtue, and for creativity - within women, and within everyone.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out that people tend to get interested in politics again every 30 years. The universe moves in cycles of three. The number figures in everything from Pythagoras's theory that the universe is based on three to the Father-the-Son-and-the-Holy- Ghost to the three-sided pyramidal shapes that intersect in the Jewish Star of David. The notion of the mystical three, metaphysically, spiritually, and even politically, is quite interesting to me.

I've come to trust not that events will always unfold exactly as I want, but that I will be fine either way. The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.