The purpose of leadership is not to make the present bearable. The purpose of leadership is to make the future possible.
We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.
Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.
Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit.
We must learn to pray out of our weaknesses so that God can become our strength.
The God who made us dust knows we're dust. We don't have to feel like perpetual failures because we aren't more than we are, and we don't have to be in contest and contention with everybody around us, because once I know myself and realize I have limitations, then two things happen: I realize my need for you, and I do not expect more from you than I expect from myself. So mercy comes with it, joy comes with it, authenticity comes with it, and freedom comes with it.
Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.
It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other.
When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.
Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.
Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.
Just when summer gets perfect-fresh nights, soft sun, casual breezes, crushingly full and quietly cooling trees, empty beaches, and free weekends- it ends. Life is like that too. Just when we get it right, it starts to change. The job gets easy and we know just how to do it, and they tell us we're retired. The children grow up and get reasonable and they leave home, just when it's nice to have them around. . . . That's life on the edge of autumn. And that's beautiful-if we have the humility for it.
Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.
Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed.
Lent is the time for trimming the soul and scrapping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord we have the stamina to yes to its twists and turns with faith and hope. Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be.
When I get on the internet and hide behind a false identity, and then allow that hiding to free me from the standards of decency, to begin to use language I would never use in front of my mother, all of a sudden, there's nothing between me and you, but worse than that, there's nothing between me and my worst self.
Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.
Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn't an ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possible come.
Only ideas keep ideas flowing. When we close our minds to what is new, simply because we decide not to bother with it, we close our minds to our responsibility to ourselves - and to others - to keep on growing.
An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.
A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.
We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn't prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It's what's inside of us, not what's outside of us that counts.
There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying - which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.
We may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
