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

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God

You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.

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.

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

There has to be a womp on the side of the head that defeats and undercuts this game of performance. It has to fall apart. Now unfortunately, that very often does not happen until what I call the second half of life, when there's been enough death in the family and you start experiencing your own physical deterioration.

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