I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again.

Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.

Famine, poverty, abuse, you can't keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.

A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.

One time, a Protestant minister said, "We made Jesus blonde haired and blue eyed and very cute. We made Jesus somehow a much more feminine figure." And there's probably truth to that.

Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.