Most fathers and. . . Mothers. Only your grandmother and Ghengis Khan know how to do it.
We will go into the future as a single sacred community, or we will all perish in the desert.
The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.
It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.
Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.
To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.
As for vegetables, I do not consider a plot of ground devoted to them worthy of the honorable name of garden. Vegetables are, of course, a part of gardening, but the least, the last, -for those who do not have to raise them, the most dishonorable part.
And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
When I stand up to talk, people listen to me; they will follow what I have to say. Is it any power of mine? Of course not. St. Paul says, 'What have you that you have not received and you who have received, why do you glory as if you had not?' But the secret of my power is that I have never in fifty-five years missed spending an hour in the presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That's where the power comes from. That's where sermons are born. That's where every good thought is conceived.