Holiness has to do with who we are in God, where we abide as a "self" with an utterly reconstituted sense of our own personhood.

Once you wake up, as Jesus and Pope Francis have, you know that cleaning up is a constant process that comes on different timetables for different people, around many different issues, and for very different motivations. This is why love and growth demand discernment, not enforcement.

As Simone Weil said in various ways, it is much easier to make non-Christians into Christians than it is to make Christians into Christians. Cradle Christians are almost totally preconditioned to the carrot-on-the-stick model.

Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The "Christ journey" is indeed another name for every thing.

In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate during Easter week.

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.

God takes away the shame we have by giving us back to ourselves—by giving us God! You don't get any better than that. Human love does the same thing. When someone else loves you, they give you not just themselves, but for some reason they give you back your own self, but now a truer and better self. This dance between the Lover and the beloved is the psychology of the whole Bible, which we will see poetically described in the wonderful single book, the Song of Songs.

If you don't walk into the seond half of your own life, it is you who does not want it.

God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage—as if it were God!

we are product of our past but we don't have to be prisoners of it.

You discover your identity and purpose through a relationship with Jesus Christ.