Jesus praised faith and trust — even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

We've turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.

Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God.

For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest. Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place.

To know the Lord and his ways," as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

You rest in God, not in outcomes.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of "common sense," of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful "Beatrice.

If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.