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.

To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.

By deepening the spiritual dialogue between the spiritual traditions of the various religions in a spirit of friendship, one begins to understand just what the classical terms of the various spiritual traditions really mean.

It's obvious that humanity continues to be torn by religious violence.

While doing centering prayer, the practice is to let go of any thought or perception. The priority is to be as silent as possible and when that is not possible to let the noise of the thoughts be the sacred symbol for a while, without analyzing them.

I venture to say that it's not enough to respect and tolerate religions other than our own.

Centering prayer is a training in letting go.