Sublime

Take yourself, your work, and the God within you seriously—dedicate yourself daily, hourly, even moment by moment to love’s purposes—and the ego won’t have a chance. It knows a holy mind when it sees one. Dear God, I dedicate to You my talents and abilities. May they be used in a way that serves Your purposes. I surrender to You my business and fin

God, I pray first of all for the brothers and sisters in this jail, that you might strengthen them. I pray for the people who come to the Downtown Chapel to get something to eat and for the staff that provides for them; I pray for all the poor; I pray in thanksgiving for all the people who help me here and for Father Gary, who comes to see me. Plea

The basic principles of his way of life cut straight through to the despair of his fellows and found it groundless. By inference he says, “You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and dishonesty, even to save your lives. Your words must be Yea—Nay; anything else is evil. Hatred is destructive

Our ego is merely our fear. We all have egos, that doesn’t make us bad people. Our egos are not where we are bad but where we are wounded. The Course says that we are ‘all afraid on some level that if people saw who we really are, they would recoil in horror.’ That is why we invent the mask, to hide our true selves. But the true self—the Christ wit

Above all is it true that, in freeing others from the weight of your condemnation, you make it possible to absolve yourself from self-condemnation.

We are merely and forever inside of the divine flow, just like Isaiah’s “rain and snow.” Forgiveness is not some churchy technique or formula. Forgiveness is constant from God’s side, which should become a calm, joyous certainty on our side. Mercy received will be mercy passed on, and “will not return to me empty, until it has succeeded in what it

Gregory Boyle ministers to gang members in Los Angeles and captures the difference between a life lived for self and one lived for others: “Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.” It’s one of the inescapable truisms of life: You have to lose

J. P. de Caussade’s Abandonment of the Divine Providence,

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.