In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.
Blaise Pascal

We have to go in their door and lead them out our door.
St. Ignatius

Lord I pray that during the most difficult times of my children's lives may you surround them with good people, saints and angels
to help them - watch over them and guide them.


If you can do more, you should.
Robert Redford’s version of the magis

e.e. cummings i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of allnothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Prep News interview with Fr. Marty Hagan
Prep News: What would you say is your philosophy of how to live a good life?
Fr. Hagan: Seek beauty, seek the truth, seek goodness. No matter what kind of faith-people get all tangled up in their faith. The one duty in life is to seek the truth. And what is true will be beautiful and what what is beautiful will be good. And that’s my goal in life.

Albert Einstein "My Credo" The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is."

Dag Hammarskjold I don't know Who - or what - put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone - or Something - and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Andy Griffith Show, season 3, episode 64 Mr. McBeevee
(Andy comes downstairs after talking with Opie about Mr. McBeevee)
Barney: What did you do?
Andy: I told him I believed him.
Barney: You told him you beli...? But, Andy, what he told you's impossible.
Andy: Well, a whole lot of times I've asked him to believe things that to his mind must have seemed just as impossible.
Barney: Oh, but, Andy... the silver hat, and the jinglin'', and the smoke from the ears... what about all that?
Andy: Oh, I don't know, Barn. I guess it's a time like this when you're asked to believe something that just don't seem possible... that's the moment that decides whether you got faith in somebody or not. Barney: Yeah, but how can you explain it all?
Andy: I can't.
Barney: But you do believe in Mr. McBeevee?
Andy: No... no... no. I believe in Opie.

from the movie Second Hand Lions
B: Those stories about Africa, about you. They’re true, aren’t they?
U: Doesn't’ matter.
B: It does too. Around my mom all I hear is lies; I don’t know what to believe in.
U: Damn, if you want to believe in something, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true that’s no reason you can’t believe in it.
All right. there’s a long speech I give to young men. Sounds like you need to hear a piece of it, just a piece.
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most: that people are basically good; that honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power, mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil and, I want you to remember this, that love, true love, never dies.
You remember that boy, you remember that. It doesn’t matter if its true or not. A man should believe in those things because those things are worth believing in. Got that?
B: That was a good speech.

from Bob Overkamp I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions...Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems. To sum it all up....In some ways I feel we are as confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

Prayer of Thomas Merton

My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please
you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all
that I am doing.
And I know that if I do this, you
will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death, I will
not fear, for you are ever with me
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.

Dumbledore to Harry Potter: It is not our abilities that show who we truly are but our choices.


The most important questions in life:
Have you found someone to share your heart with? Are you giving to your community? Are yo at peace with yourself? Are you trying to be as human as you can be?”
Morrie Schwartz, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.


“There seems to be
a divine way
of doing everything:
a divine way to be
a lawyer, doctor, grandmother,
teacher, convict, homeless person,
or just to be sick.
Since the Kingdom of God
is present in ordinary circumstances,
sensitivity to the movements
of the Spirit within us
tends to increase.
On such occasions,
everyday life
can become a kind of dance.”
Fr. Thomas Keating
Manifesting God, Chapter 7, Dancing With God,
published by Lantern Books


Beauty is man’s connection to the divine.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

from Bob Overkamp I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions...Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems. To sum it all up....In some ways I feel we are as confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

from Nick Fandos
"Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get through their heads that God alone doesn't go around the world with his finger on the triggers, his fist on the knives, his hands on the steering wheel.... Never do we know enough to say death was the will of God.... My own consolation lies in knowing that.... when the waves closed over the sinking car God's heart was the first of all our hearts to beak."
     
             -William Sloane Coffin

The successful man makes a habit of doing what the failing person does not like ot do.
Thomas Edison

Nothing can stop the man with the right attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Thomas Jefferson.