There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.

greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection.

God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous—or it is hardly grace at all!

cacradicalgrace.org

On a man's journey, everything has its place. Our failures, heartbreaks, defeats, and victories; our wounds, dreams, and passions; our stops and our starts-all have a place in our story, and all have a place in our transformation from shadow men to real men. Everything has meaning, and everything belongs.

Jesus revealed how to bear the pain of the world instead of handing on the pain to those around you. When you stop resisting suffering, when you can really do something so foolish as to welcome the pain, it leads you into a broad and spacious place where you live out of the abundance of Divine Love. I can't promise you pain will leave quickly or easily. To forgive is not the same as to forget.

Religion, at its best, helps people to bring this foundational divine love into ever-increasing consciousness. In other words, it's more about waking up than about cleaning up.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

the state of mind of the "shipwrecked"3 is perhaps a necessary beginning point for any salvation from such drowning.

You can't grow strong without resistance.

Grief is a good thing. It's the way we get through the transitions of life.