Quotes of the Day

There are two kinds of deserts. The desolute wastelands, with their silences and overwhelming night skies, their hidden dangers, and the demands put on those who would enter them......we have also know another kind of desert - one that is constructed either by human malevolence (the gulags and camps..) or by human indifference and neglect (the slums and innter cities of our urban landscape)....

It was Thomas Merton who taught us that solitude is not simply a matter of geography. All Christians need to find their desert if they wish to imitate the Christ who opened his ministry in one.....

The flight to the desert is not an effort to spurn the "world" and its secular inhabitants. Instead the desert is a school of love, a school of prayer, where we can learn to enter more deeply into the mystery of God who, out of love, entered so intimately into our humanity........

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had been a poor man and a worker. As a carpenter in Nazareth he had, in those lowly circumstances, embodied the Gospel message in its entirety, before ever announcing it in words....

.....Every circumstance no matter how unforeseen and every person no matter how poor, harbors an invitation to communion with God......

Nothing is to be gained from the search for God in the desert if it does not make it easier to find God in the midst of one's fellow human beings.....

A Life of prayer need not relieve one of a passion for social justice and a spirit of solidarity. At the same time....social activists ...in the midst of their good works...must preserve a place of stillness, a place where they can listen to the word of God and find renewal......

....The heart of the Gospel is to make of ourselves an oasis of love in whatever desert we might find ourselves....


- "Letters from the Desert" - Carlo Caretto (Anniversary Edition, Orbis Books, 2002)