All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain... By trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us in deep and mysterious ways that ironically...

What makes us human beings so uniquely wonderful in this puzzling universe is that we never give up on love. Against all odds, with no guarantee of being loved in return, out of the hate and hurt so often handed us, in the face of the sad suffering history has let us see, we go on loving....

The invisibility of whiteness means that one doesn't have to notice that one is white. So there are people, and then there are black people. There are people and there are Latino people. And people—just people, just folks—turn out to be white, but we don't notice it. White people have the luxury...

"The thing that's really slick about whiteness, if you will, is that most of the benefits can be obtained without ever doing anything personally......

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." This quote has been widely attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There is no question for which compassion is not the answer."...

وطن المرء ليس مكان ولادته و لكنه المكان الذي تنتهي فيه كل محاولاته للهروب "Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."...

"Desire is owning the wanting."...

"The purpose of the church is to heal the consequences of lovelessness and injustice in the hearts and souls of our members so they might heal the community and together heal the world."...

"We hold on to hell because when we discard it we glimpse through the clearing smoke a God who is too complicated for us."...

“God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist..."

"Our children did not get their wounds alone. They were created by the actions of our family, our communities and our world. They were created by the things we choose to believe in, the causes we chose to champion and the despair we chose to neglect....

"There is a hope that's been expressed in you: the hope of seven generations, maybe more. And this is the faith that they invest in you: It's that you'll do one better than was done before. Inside you know, inside you understand; inside you know what's yours to finally set right..." —lyrics from...

"Our first task in approaching another people, another culture, another religion, is to take off our shoes, for the place we are approaching is holy. Else we may find ourselves treading on [people's] dreams. More seriously still, we may forget that God was here before our arrival."...

Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.

Unconditional love is not so much about how we receive and endure each other, as it is about the deep vow to never, under any condition, stop bringing the flawed truth of who we are to each other.

Please note: written in 1969, Berry's reflection on the "wound" of racism was written before inclusive gender was used. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself....

"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”...

“Hope has to be seen to be believed. It has to be made visible. It has to be something we can feel and touch. We are called to be persons who embody hope for one another. We have to be each other’s partners in hope.”...

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.