Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.

The movement toward gratitude, authenticity, and union is the natural and organic inner work of the second half of our lives.

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

Moralism is always the cheap substitute for mysticism.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.