“Heaven on earth is wherever people are filled with love for God, for their fellowmen, and for themselves.”

-Saint Hildegard of Bingen

God we pray that each one of us will be gifted with a respect for all of God’s creation and an awareness of the richness bestowed upon each of  us.  Bless us with an open mind, a listening ear and a helping hand in all our endeavors.  Amen

-Sisters of Bon Secours Prayer Book, 2015

Keep your soul in peace.  Welcome thoughts that raise your heart to God.  Open wide the window of your soul.

-Saint Ignatius Loyola

“Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work — hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss — loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.

-Jean Vanier, Finding Peace

All actions end in passion because the response to our action is out of our hands. This is the mystery of work, the mystery of love, the mystery of friendship, the mystery of community-they always involve waiting.  And that is the mystery of Jesus’ love.  God is revealed in Jesus as the one who waits for our response.

-Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope

“When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively, no distraction   My whole life becomes a prayer.”

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

“This sitting at the feet of the Divine with an attentive and loving heart is a posture we all like to assume, whether we recognize it or not.  Our longing for it is deep and universal.  What so many people nowadays don’t know is that Mary is the lost sister.  She’s the lost and beautiful part within each of us, the contemplative that sits in divine presence with a fully attuned heart.”

-Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

“And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

-Luke 11: 9-10

The hungry nations of the world cry out to the peoples blessed with abundance.  And the Church, cut to the quick by this cry, asks each and every man to hear his brother’s plea and answer it lovingly.

-Pope Paul VI

Even God could not do anything for someone who left no room for him.  One must be completely empty in order to let him in, so that he may do what he wants.

-Mother Teresa