Every time we make the decision to love someone we open ourselves to great suffering because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies the pain of the leaving can tear us apart.Still if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear life stronger than death hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.

Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart that is at that point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There Gods Spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart because there we stand before the face of the Lord all-seeing with us.

For many of us prayer means nothing more than speaking with God. And since it usually seems to be a quite one-sided affair prayer simply means talking to God. This idea is enough to create great frustrations. If I present a problem I expect a solution if I formulate a question I expect an answer if I ask for guidance I expect a response. And when it seems increasingly that I am talking into the dark it is not so strange that I soon begin to suspect that my dialogue with God is in fact a monologue. Then I may begin to ask myself To whom am I really speaking God or myself

When we say to people I will pray for you we make a very important commitment. The sad thing is that this remark often remains nothing but a well-meant expression of concern. But when we learn to descend with our mind into our heart then all those who have become part of our lives are led into the healing presence of God and touched by him in the center of our being. We are speaking here about a mystery for which words are inadequate. It is the mystery that the heart which is the center of our being is transformed by God into his own heart a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow all conflicts and agonies all torture and war all hunger loneliness and misery not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity but because Gods heart has become one with ours.

a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.

Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.

Praying demands that you take to the road again and again leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your fellow human. This is why praying demands poverty that is the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.