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Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.
Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.
We don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness?
Every human being is a mixture of light and darkness, trust and fear, love and hate.
A community which refuses to welcome - whether through fear, weariness, insecurity, a desire to cling to comfort, or just because it is fed up with visitors - is dying spiritually.
Wisdom is something that comes, little by little, through a lot of listening.
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals.
A community is only a community when the majority of its members are making the transition from 'the community for myself' to 'myself for the community'.
We cannot grow spiritually if we ignore our humanness, just as we cannot become fully human if we ignore our spirituality.
The belly laugh is the best way to evacuate anguish.
Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships, is different. But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it. Love is what we most want, yet it is what we fear the most.
A tension or difficulty can signal the approach of a new grace of God. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly.
In the end, the most important thing is not to do things for people who are poor and in distress, but to enter into relationship with them, to be with them and help them find confidence in themselves and discover their own gifts.
Each human being, however small or weak, has something to bring to humanity. As we start to really get to know others, as we begin to listen to each other's stories, things begin to change. We begin the movement from exclusion to inclusion, from fear to trust, from closedness to openness, from judgment and prejudice to forgiveness and understanding. It is a movement of the heart.
People may come to our communities because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are poor.
People are longing to rediscover true community. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.
When we begin to believe that there is greater joy in working with and for others, rather than just for ourselves, then our society will truly become a place of celebration.
The person in misery does not need a look that judges and criticizes but a comforting presence that brings peace and hope and life and says: 'you are a human person: important, mysterious, infinitely precious, what you have to say is important because it flows from a humn person; in you there are those seeds of the infinite, those germs of love... of beauty which must rise from the earth of your misery so humanity be fulfilled. If you do not rise then something will be missing... Rise again because we all need you... be loved beloved.'
The strong need the weak as much as the weak need the strong
Our danger is to think that happiness will come from outside of us, from the things we possess or the power of our group, and not from within us, from the inner sanctuary of our being.
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