“Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.”

“Discipline is to present us before grace, it does not produce grace to make sense.”

“Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we received as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety.”

“Worship may produce an outward change, but our inner condition will eventually be revealed”

“Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.”

“Restriction often enhances clarity.”

“Confession is a difficult discipline for us, because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin.”

“True service is a lifestyle. It acts from the ingrained patterns of living. It springs spontaneously to meet human need.”

“Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial”

“Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.”

“Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.”