“We who bear the name Christ and call ourselves Christian should do his works according to his Word, but so often we mistake our own social, cultural, and personal desires for the Word of God. This is how some self-identified Christians end up committing all sorts of hatred, discrimination, and violence. But this is also how more ordinary women and men like you and me, who also bear the name Christ, end up judging and excluding, seeking wealth, and ignoring the poor, advancing our own power while marginalizing those who already have no voice. This is not the truth about which Jesus speaks.

Jesus’s truth, the truth of the Word of God, is a truth of radical relationship and self-sacrificial love. It is a love of neighbor and stranger and enemy that is peace that the world cannot give. It is a truth that is not so much easily understood as challengingly lived out.”

 –from the book God Is Not Fair, And Other Reasons for Gratitude

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“All the things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better, love him more surely, and serve him more faithfully.”

— St. Ignatius of Loyola

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“Without doubt, Jesus Christ could have abolished pain at a single stroke, and, by virtue of the infinite grace of the Redemption, restored man to the state of complete, unmixed bliss that he enjoyed in the paradise of innocence. He did not so wish. He judged that, for some, suffering would be a source of merit, a gain, a source of glory, and a means of renewal and triumph; that, for the greater number, it would be a necessary expiation. He therefore maintained suffering, but purified, ennobled, and transfigured it by taking it upon Himself. He became the man of sorrows, virum dolorum, in the strict and absolute sense of these words.”

— Fr. Charles Arminjon