"We sing because cruelty has no name / But we can name its destiny / We sing because the child because everything / Because the future because the people / We sing because the survivors / And our dead want us to sing"  --Mario Benedetti, translation of “Por Qué Cantamos”

“As I reflect on this latest American massacre, I keep returning to the questions: Who are we as a nation if we do not act to protect our children? What do we love more: our instruments of death or our future?”  --Cardinal Blase Cupich (Archdiocese of Chicago) Quote posted on Vatican News Twitter Feed May 25, 2022

"The Second Amendment did not come down from Sinai. The right to bear arms will never be more important than human life. Our children have rights too. And our elected officials have a moral duty to protect them.”  --Cardinal Blase Cupich (Archdiocese of Chicago) Quote posted on Vatican News Twitter Feed May 25, 2022

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."  --George Orwell

Be Alone with God

"Solitude and silence can never be separated from the call to unceasing prayer. If solitude were primarily an escape from a busy joy, and silence primarily an escape from a noisy milieu, they could easily become very self-centered forms of asceticism. But solitude and silence are for prayer. The Desert Fathers did not think of solitude as being alone, but as being alone with God. They did not think of silence as not speaking but as listening to God. Solitude and silence are the context within which prayer is practiced."--Henri Nouwen

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world . . . would do this, it would change the earth."  --William Faulkner

"For you, the gun-wounded, the gunned down, / and the loved ones who were left behind, / we speak in love / and we don’t go quietly."  --Da’Shawn Mosley, “In the Mourning”

"May we build a kinder land / where our children understand: / Every child here matters more / than the guns we clamor for."  --Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, “A Hymn For People Called To Do More Than Sing and Pray”

“Truth is something that is always new. Therefore the mind cannot come to it with a conclusion, an opinion or a judgment. The mind must be free for truth to be."  --Jiddu Krishnamurti

"I was born with the same gift from God we are all born with—the impulse to reach out and lessen the suffering of another human being."  --Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine (2018)

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.”  -- Roald Dahl

"Whether you believe in autonomous ghosts and spirits or not, it is difficult not to at least think of the spectral echoes of those whose pasts we retrace as we move through the spaces we share. As such, paradoxically, it isn’t necessarily the presence of the spirits of place that haunt us but their absence, and as long as we have the clues with which to construct them, ghosts will always be ready, just waiting to emerge."  --Richard Maclean Smith, Unexplained, p. 227

“Love feels no burden,

thinks nothing of trouble,

attempts what is above its strength,

pleads no excuse of impossibility."

--Thomas à Kempis

Something Has Happened

"One of the experiences of prayer is that it seems that nothing happens. But when you stay with it and look back over a long period of prayer, you suddenly realize that something has happened. What is most close, most intimate, most present often cannot be experienced directly but only with a certain distance. When I think I am only distracted, just wasting my time, something is happening too immediate for knowing, understanding, and experiencing. Only in retrospect do I realize that something very important has taken place. Isn’t this true of all really important events in life? When I am together with someone I love very much, we seldom talk about our relationship. The relationship, in fact, is too central to be a subject of talk. But later, after we have separated and write letters, we realize how much it all meant to us, and we even write about it."  --Henri Nouwen

“Unless you see an open bosom and show your own, you can have nothing worthy of confidence, nothing of which you can feel certain, not even the fact of your loving or being loved, since you are ignorant of what either really is."  --Cicero

“The holy man is he who takes your soul and will and makes them his. When you choose your holy man, you surrender your will. You give it to him in utter submission, in full renunciation.”  --Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"I, who am but a little grain of sand, wish to set to work, though I have neither courage nor strength. Now this very want of power will make my task easier, for I wish to work for love."   --St. Therese of Lisieux

"To live by love is to go through life sowing peace and joy in hearts!"   --St. Therese of Lisieux

“'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' So said Thomas Paine many years ago. . . . We do have it in our power to change ourselves, to attempt to right past wrongs, and to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share. It's this work that is the bedrock of shock resistance."  --Naomi Klein, No is not Enough

"Contemplative life is a human response to the fundamental fact that the central things in life, although spiritually perceptible, remain invisible in large measure and can very easily be overlooked by the inattentive, busy, distracted person that each of us can so readily become. The contemplative looks not so much around things but through them into their center. Through their center he discovers the world of spiritual beauty that is more real, has more density, more mass, more energy, and greater intensity than physical matter. In effect, the beauty of physical matter is a reflection of its inner content."  --Henri Nouwen