Joy, not grit, is the hallmark of holy obedience. We need to be light-hearted in what we do to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. It is a cheerful revolt against self and pride.

God's heart is the most sensitive and tender of all. No act goes unnoticed, no matter how insignificant or small.

If we are silent when we should speak, we are not living the Discipline of silence. If we speak when we should be silent, we again miss the mark.

Without the cross the Discipline of Confession would be merely therapeutic. But it is so much more. It involves an objective [a better word would have been "metaphysical"] change in our relationship with God and a subjective change in us. It is a means of healing and transforming the inner spirit.

We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air.

We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart.

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.