Humility

My dear Lady, I beg you to entrust your mission to one of the important persons who is well known, respected, and esteemed....  I am nobody, a nothing... a pitle of sticks.

St. Juan Diego to Our Lady of Guadelupe

The Power of Words

Words create and destroy.  They create worlds to enter and dwell in.  They give us visions of things never before seen and restore memories long forgotten.  They have the capacity to reveal the human heart of one person to another and to bind together thousands of people into a community of common purpose.  Words also can destroy, strike at the core of long accepted truths and subvert them. They can penetrate and in a few strokes obliterate what we thought was secure and lasting.  Words can betray and seduce, defile and deny.

Jim Wallace, Preaching to the Hungers of the Heart

Martyrdom

Live as though you were going to have to die as a martyr today.

The more we lack in this world, the more surely we discover the best thing the earth has to offer us:  the cross.

The more firmly we embrace the cross, the more closely we are bound to Jesus, our Beloved, who is made fast to it.

-Charles de Foucauld

St. Ambrose on Leadership

The difference between good and bad rulers is that the good love freedom, the bad slavery.

St. Ambrose of Milan

Institutionalism in the Church

"There are real reasons for fearing that the Church might take on too many institutions of human law and then become like Saul's armor which prevented young David from walking.  It is always necessary to study whether institutions that were useful in the past are still useful today.  The only institutional element the Church needs is the one the Lord gave her; the sacramental structure of the people of God, centered on the Eucharist."

Pope Benedict XVI

Discovering Taize, August 20, 1940

Human beings only create by drawing on their poverty.  I am well placed to assert that today:  it is exactly thirty years ago that I discovered Taize.

Br. Roger of Taize, from his Journal August 20, 1970

Br. Roger of Taize - Rest in Peace

When I was young, at a time when Europe was torn apart by so many conflicts, I kept on asking myself: Why all these confrontations?  Why do so many people, even Christians, condemn one another out of hand?  And I wondered:  is there, on this earth, a way of reaching complete understanding of others?  Then came a day - I can still remember the date, and I could describe the place:  the subdued light of a late summer evening, darkness settling over the countryside -- a day when I made a decision.  I said to myself, if this way does exist, begin with yourself and resolve to understand every person fully.  That day, I was certain the vow I had made was for life.  It involved nothing less than returning again and again, my whole life long, to this irrevocable decision:  seek to understand all, rather than to be understood.

Br. Roger of Taize 1915-2005

On August 16, during a prayer service at Taize,

Brother Roger is fatally wounded by a mentally unbalanced assailant.

  He dies at the age of ninety.