You can't break through Hollywood formulaic points of view. I've tried, and I think I was more successful than anybody at doing it.

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.

We are agents of omnipotence. This means that unlimited power is at our fingertips. It also means that there are no great men working in God's Kingdom. Rather, there is a great God at work in human beings who have childlike faith.

It is amazing to watch God do through us what we could never accomplish on our own. It is comforting to know we have a God who is, always faithful, desires more for us than we could imagine, and perfectly capable of doing the impossible.

Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, "I've got it." Always and forever, mystery gets you!

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.

Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the "practical atheism" that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we've been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been an inside and secret sort of job. The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans start fighting about it.

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

We need to encounter the hero within and let him lead us on the adventure of our lives.

All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.

When you think of the limitation in your life, you may be tempted to conclude, "God could never use me." But God is never limited by our limitations.