In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.

In silence all our usual patterns assault us ... That is why most people give up rather quickly. When Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the first things to show up were the wild beasts.

To give, and not demand that others receive . . . that is the crossover point to maturity. . .

If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we're in our middle years, when we've experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.

Pope Francis insists that mercy is at the very top of the Christian hierarchy of great truths, and everything falls apart whenever mercy is displaced by anything else.

Modern culture is in so much trouble, where people don't have a deep inner life, or any deep experience of their true self in God, who they were before anyone said anything about them, before they received their first medal or ego identification. That`s why suffering is so important, because suffering is when those little rewards are taken away from you.