Without Easter, Good Friday Would Have No

Above All We Must Not Wish To Cling To Our Suffering. Suffering Surely Deepens Us And Enhances Our Person, But We Must Not Desire To Become A Deeper Self Than God Wills. To Suffer No Longer Can Be A Beautiful, Perhaps The Ultimate Sacrifice.

To Be Sure, The Response Of Faith To Revelation, Which God Grants To The Creature He Chooses And Moves With His Love, Occurs In Such A Way That It Is Truly The Creature That Provides The Response, With Its Own Nature And Its Natural Powers Of Love.

But The Saints Are Never The Kind Of Killjoy Spinster Aunts Who Go In For Faultfinding And Lack All Sense Of Humor. (nor Should The Karl Barth Who So Loved And Understood Mozart Be Regarded As Such.)for Humor Is A Mysterious But Unmistakable Charism Inseparable From Catholic Faith, And Neither The "progressives" Nor The "integralists" Seem To Possess It - The Latter Even Less Than The Former.

The Greatest Tragedy In The History Of Christianity Was Neither The Crusades Nor The Reformation Nor The Inquisition, But Rather The Split That Opened Up Between Theology And Spirituality At The End Of The Middle Ages.

When You Say Yes To God Unconditionally, You Have No Idea How Far This Yes Is Going To Take You. Certainly Farther Than You Can Guess And Calculate Beforehand... But Just How Far And In What Form? At The Same Time, This Yes Is The Sole, Non-negotiable Prerequisite Of All Christian Understanding, Of All Theology And Ecclesial Wisdom.