If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, looking back at me with deep gratitude for how authentically human I am being to them—and they to me!—reading poetry to each other, admiring pictures of each other’s...
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Human One. Talk about an upside-down universe! I’m not happy when people hate me—and some people do hate me. Jesus is saying that we have to...
When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.
Christmas is a 12-day feast. It begins on the evening of December 24th and ends on the evening of January 5th, or Twelfth Night. Practice a deeper Christmas. Stay with the story of the human God. It means so much that God is one of us. The mystery is too great for one...
Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.
It would be foolish to pretend that it is always easy to remember [that Christ is present in the ordinary stranger]. . . . If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head, and the moon under her feet...
Christ came into the world to make us truly human. When we look at human beings today in terms of what God has done for humanity in the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, we should respond with awesome wonder and treat everyone with tender dignity —...
In Christ’s incarnation all of humanity regains the dignity of bearing the image of God. Whoever from now on attacks the least of the people attacks Christ, who took on human form and who in himself has restored the image of God for all who bear a human countenance....
Our culture teaches us about shame--it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren't born craving perfect bodies. We weren't born afraid to tell our stories. We weren't born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren't born with a Pottery Barn...
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.