When we lift the cup of our life and share with one another our sufferings and joys in mutual vulnerability, the new covenant can become visible among us. The surprise of it all is that it is often the least among us who reveal to us that our cup is a cup of blessings.

When you heed only your lion, you will find yourself overextended and exhausted. When you take notice only of your lamb, you will easily become a victim of your need for other people's attention.

In solitude we discover that community is not a common ideology, but a response to a common call.

Real loneliness comes when we have lost all sense of having things in common. When

When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us.

We resist getting near the suffering of another partly out of our unwillingness to suffer ourselves.

the celebration of the resurrection of the body is also the celebration of the daily care given to the bodies of these handicapped men and women. Washing and feeding, pushing wheelchairs, carrying, kissing, and caressing— these are all ways in which these broken bodies are made ready for the moment of a new life. Not only their wounds but also the care given them will remain visible in the resurrection.

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.

detach ourselves from making our individual experience the criterion for our approach to others

The more we try to justify ourselves, the more we collide with our inability to do so. The more burdens we take on, the more we burden others with our unmet needs. Is it any wonder that our words do not help and our presence does not heal?

Together, Yet Not Too Near When we try to shake off our loneliness by creating a milieu without limiting boundaries, we may become entangled in a stagnating closeness.

As long as our loneliness brings us together with the hope that together we no longer will be alone, we castigate each other with our unfulfilled and unrealistic desires for oneness, inner tranquility and the uninterrupted experience of communion.