Speech is the mirror of the mind.
And joy is always a promise.
God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.
I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.
As I listen to the silence, I learn that my feelings about art and my feelings about the Creator of the Universe are inseparable. To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.
All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.
I teach you both effort and effortlessness, because unless you attain to effortless-effort, unless you attain to active passivity, unless you attain to a singing-silence - they look paradoxical - unless you attain to an unmoving dance, you have not attained.
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
Not knowing that we can be loved for who we truly are prevents us from trusting in love itself, and this in turn causes us to turn away from life and doubt its benevolence.
In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.