Friendship is a sheltering tree.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGEIn Spite of Freud and Marx

Freud once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. This may or may not be the case. But I am convinced that religion is the royal road to the heart of a civilization, the clearest indicator of its hopes and terrors, the surest index of how it is changing . …Even that most famous of atheists, Karl Marx, after all, once said that religion is "the heart of a heartless world."

If man is the head, she [woman] is the crown, a crown to her husband, the crown of visible creation. The man was dust refined, but the woman was dust double-refined.

Evangelists who … uproot the church as they know it … in their home country and set out to transplant that tree in foreign soil … demonstrate a great cultural insensitivity. Their efforts are going to bring them into conflict with the culture they hope to evangelize. It would be a wiser and far more effective strategy for them to think of the good news of salvation not as a tree but as a seed to be planted in other fields where soil conditions and local rains, winds, climate, minerals, and light will give a special size and shape to that which grows from the seed. The same seed would grow into different shapes and sizes if planted elsewhere.

Nourish beginnings,
let us nourish beginnings.

Not all things are blest, but
the seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
PHILO OF ALEXANDRIATrue Vocation

A [person] knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live. … When we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens ...