Life does not have to be this way. You don’t have to be this way. You can begin again. All that you require has been here all along. You need only return to the mystery of your own baptism.

To live in the real, to reject illusion is to set our face toward growth and toward God.

You might ask, “Shouldn’t we all pretend to be Jesus?” We should, but that does not seem to have gotten most of us all that far. Perhaps a humbler role is a better beginning.

The Beatitudes do not describe the world in which we live. They tell us how to live in this world so as to seed one yet to come. Belief in another world gives us the courage to resist and to renew this one.

We feel regret when we recognize that are past behaviors were too small, too defensive, too rooted in our own selves.

By itself, suffering is no gateway to greatness. Yet it’s hard to find titans of history who didn’t know great sorrow.