St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.

Technology isn't fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.

We need to develop the intuitive capacities of the brain that some geniuses have manifested over humanity's lengthy history.

For us to remain in this world, our animal brain has to be there to support us.

We're obviously at the edge of something quite new in humanity's experience. That is this globalization process which isn't just economic or social, but involves the interpenetration of cultures, people moving to different places several times in their lifetime, traveling for business or pleasure, and marrying people of very different cultural backgrounds, all of which was almost impossible a hundred years ago.

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.