If the Word truly became flesh, then God had not only a mother, but also a grandmother, cousins, great-aunts, and weird uncles. If the Word truly dwelt among us, then he was part of a family that, like most, was fairly dysfunctional, a mix of the good and bad, the saintly and the sinful, the glorious and the not so glorious. And this is such good news for us.

In a way, fasting is like the "calming of the monkey mind" effected by the rosary prayer: both are means of stilling the effervescence of relatively superficial preoccupations.

The human race is one big dysfunctional family.

The holiness of God is like a white light: pure, simple, complete. But when that light shines, as it were, through the prisms of individual human lives, it breaks into an infinite variety of colors... each one reveals a unique dimension of the divine holiness.

The long nights that Pier Giorgio Frassati spent on his knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament had something to do with the long days spent in service of the poor.

Christ's invitation to the priesthood is an invitation to a way of life that is athletic in its intensity and heroic in its form.

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes.