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December 31, 2017 - December 27, 2018
most people do not want to be distracted but heard, not entertained but sustained.
If it is true that people age the way they live, our first task is to help people discover their lifestyles in which “being” is not identified with “having,” self-esteem does not depend on success, and goodness is not the same as popularity.
That is true not only of money and material goods, but also of peace and purity of heart.
Help me, O Lord, to let my old self die, to let me die to the thousand big and small ways in which I am still building up my false self and trying to cling to my false desires.
Gratitude is the awareness that life in all its manifestations is a gift for which we want to give thanks. The closer we come to God in prayer, the more we become aware of the abundance of God’s gifts to us.
gratitude becomes a quality of our hearts that allows us to live joyfully and peacefully even though our struggles continue.
gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment.
And the closer we come to nature, the closer we touch the core of life when we celebrate. Nature makes us aware of the preciousness of life. Nature tells us that life is precious not only because it is, but also because it does not have to be.
Our difficult and very urgent task is to accept the truth that nature is not primarily a property to be possessed, but a gift to be received with admiration and gratitude. Only when we make a deep bow to the rivers, oceans, hills, and mountains that offer us a home, only then can they become transparent and reveal to us their real meaning.
But we could do an immense service to our world if we would let nature heal, counsel, and teach again. I often wonder if the sheer artificiality and ugliness with which many people are surrounded are not as bad as or worse than their interpersonal problems.
Looked upon from above, our years on earth are not simply chronos, but kairos—another Greek word for time—which is the opportunity to claim for ourselves the love that God offers us from eternity to eternity.
These natural, daily activities contain within them some transforming power that changes how we live. We make hidden passage from time lived as chronos to time lived as kairos.
Each moment is like a seed that carries within itself the possibility of becoming the moment of change….We no longer need to run from present time in search of the place where we think life is really happening. We begin to have a truer vision of the world and of our lives in relationship to time and eternity.
But when we believe that patience can make our expectations grow, then fate can be converted into a vocation, wounds into a call for deeper understanding, and sadness into a birthplace of joy.
There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. There we can feel that the cruel reality of history is indeed the reality of the human heart, our own included, and that to protest asks, first of all, for a confession of our own participation in the human condition. There
am increasingly convinced that conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution. Therefore, every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and one who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society.
since in the midst of their struggle for a new world they will find that they are also fighting their own reactionary fears and false ambitions.
But none of us will be able to really give if he has not discovered that what he gives is only a small thing compared to what we have received.
As long as we see only distasteful poverty, we are not really entitled to give.
there is hidden so much richness and beauty, so much affection and human warmth, that the work they are doing is only a small return for what they have already received.
All Christian action—whether it is visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or working for a more just and peaceful society—is a manifestation of the human solidarity revealed to us in the house of God.
You have to catch the paradox: that we can really be in the world, involved in the world, and actively engaged in the world precisely because we do not belong to it, precisely because that is not where our dwelling place is.
Underneath all our emphasis on successful action, many of us suffer from a deep-seated, low self-esteem….And so our actions become more an expression of fear than of inner freedom….
But once I am able to truly confess my most profound dependence on others and on God, I can come in touch with my true self and real community can develop.
Jesus calls us to seek our unity in and through him. When we direct our inner attention not first of all to each other, but to God to whom we belong, then we will discover that in God we also belong to each other.
That peace that God gives us quite often is beyond our thoughts and feelings, and we have to really trust that peace is there for us to claim even in the midst of our moments of despair.
Dear God, As you draw me ever deeper into your heart, I discover that my companions on the journey are women and men loved by you as fully and as intimately as I am. In your compassionate heart, there is a place for all of them. No one is excluded. Give me a share in your compassion, dear God, so that your unlimited love may become visible in the way I love my brothers and sisters. Amen.
Something very deep and mysterious, very holy and sacred, is taking place in our lives right where we are, and the more attentive we become the more we will begin to see and hear it. The more our spiritual sensitivities come to the surface of our daily lives, the more we will discover—uncover—a new presence in our lives.
How can we also come to this wisdom of the flower that being is more important than doing? How can we come to a creative contact with the grounding of our own life?
And the amazing thing is that our fruitfulness comes out of our vulnerability and not just out of our power. Actually it comes out of our powerlessness.
So you have to realize that you are part of that beautiful process, that your death is not the end but in fact it is the source of your fruitfulness beyond you in new generations, in new centuries.
When we are filled with God’s merciful presence, we can do nothing other than minister because our whole being witnesses to the light that has come into the darkness.
Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty that the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses.
For a compassionate man nothing human is alien; no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal love.
Once we deeply trust that we ourselves are precious in God’s eyes, we are able to recognize the preciousness of others and their unique place in God’s heart.
Sometimes it seems as though you might lose yourself along with your revenge and hate—so you stand there with balled-up fists, closed to the other who wants to heal you….
In prayer, we are constantly on our way, on a pilgrimage. On our way, we meet more and more people who show us something about the God whom we seek.
But you can enjoy them truly only when you can acknowledge them as affirmations of the truth that you are the Beloved of God. The truth will set you free to receive the beauty of nature and culture in gratitude, as a sign of your Belovedness. That truth will allow you to receive the gifts you receive from your society and celebrate life.
What is possible is to open your hands without fear, so that the One who loves you can blow your sins away.
Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature.
It is through our broken, vulnerable, mortal ways of being that the healing power of the eternal God becomes visible to
Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write.
To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.
Once we dare to “give away” on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath these thoughts and gradually come in touch with our own riches.
may sound strange, but I often feel closer to friends I write than to friends I speak with by phone.
The beauty of letter writing is that it deepens friendships and makes them more real.
Thank God for letters, for those who send them, and for those who receive them.
Those you have deeply loved become part of you.
