Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it. — Rubem A. Alves
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Henri Amiel
Life is short. And we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind. — Henri Amiel
Frederick Buechner
Maybe more than anything else, to be a saint is to know joy. Not happiness that comes and goes with the moments that occasion it, but joy that is always there like an underground spring no matter how dark and terrible the night. To be a saint is to be a little out of one's mind, which is a very good thing to be a little out of from time to time. It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full. — Frederick Buechner
William Bryant Logan
Hospitality is the fundamental virtue of the soil. It makes room. It shares. It neutralizes poisons. And so it heals. This is what the soil teaches: If you want to be remembered, give yourself away. — William Bryant Logan
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.
Nicholas Kristof
For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year [2012], about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands. — Nicholas Kristof
Thomas Merton
The Gospel is handed down from generation to generation but it must reach each one of us brand new, or not at all. If it is merely "tradition" and not news, it has not been preached or not heard—it is not Gospel. . . . If there is no risk in revelation, if there is no fear in it, if there is no challenge in it, if it is not a word which creates whole new worlds, and new beings, if it does not call into existence a new creature, our new self, then religion is dead and God is dead. — Thomas Merton
Bill Lane Doulos
The kingdom which was the theme of Jesus’ preaching and teaching is not a low-risk, blue-chip investment created for our consumption. It can’t be calmly considered and casually digested. It can’t be domesticated, nor can its leader be restrained from his continuous challenge to our way of life.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
It is very remarkable that we face the thought that God is coming so calmly, whereas previously peoples trembled at the day of God, whereas the world fell into trembling when Jesus Christ walked over the earth. That is why we find it so strange when we see the marks of God in the world so often together with the marks of human suffering. . . . We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God's coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God's coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mary Oliver
Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? . . . The gospel of
light is the crossroads of—indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.