In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.

My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.

There are three things we have to let go of. The first is the compulsion to be successful. Second, is the compulsion to be right-especially theologically right. (That's merely an ego trip, and because of this "need" churches split in half, with both parties prisoners of their own egos.) Finally, there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.