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The more we focus on what God’s plan for us might be, the less we need to concern ourselves with other people’s reactions. Our self-worth is not dependent on other people’s opinions of us. No one else has the power to make us better or worse than we are. Only our choices can do that. We are here because the God who gave us free will also loved us into existence. It is not easy to remember this without some outside validation to help us. That might be why God created us to live in community.

The goal of a spirituality of desire is nothing more— and nothing less—than to be with God. There are many paths to get there, but our challenge is to find the unique path that God has laid out for each one of us. With varying levels of awareness, we are all walking this path. But to discover what it is we are looking for it is not enough to set our sights on being with God in some ideal heavenly future. The spiritual life requires an appreciation of how God is with us where we are now and where God was—or wasn’t—with us in our past.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. This short prayer of praise known as the Glory Be comes at the end of each decade, but it is not simply a closing prayer. Rather it is meant to express the peak of our contemplation. Praise of the Holy Trinity is the Christian response to the events of salvation that God has accomplished in his Son.

Pierre Toussaint’s life really is a remarkable one that leaves you saying, “That’s incredible.” It is hard to believe that a man would remain enslaved just because his widowed owner needed him. It is also a stretch to understand how one man could endure racial indignities, even in his church, yet continue to nurture his Catholic spirit of philanthropy and good will. How does such a person manage to remain positive amid every obstacle and emerge as a pillar of courage and strength both for his oppressors and supporters?

Jesus was familiar with the human condition. Nazareth did not protect him from the state of fallen humanity. Rather it afforded him concrete observations of that condition, the condition he came to redeem. Although Joseph would not witness the cross of his son, he participated in it by the sacrifice of his life, the toil of his daily work. He undertook this work in order to properly care for Mary and Jesus. In this Joseph experienced in his life a glimmer of the resurrection.

I ask myself: Am I a Christian by fits and starts, or am I a Christian full-time? Our culture of the ephemeral, the relative, also takes its toll on the way we live our faith. God asks us to be faithful to him, daily, in our everyday life. He goes on to say that, even if we are sometimes unfaithful to him, he remains faithful. In his mercy, he never tires of stretching out his hand to lift us up, to encourage us to continue our journey, to come back and tell him of our weakness, so that he can grant us his strength.

How important was the Blessed Virgin to the faith of the early Church? She was essential. Writing in the middle of the third century, Origen of Alexandria evoked the scene at the cross, as the Beloved Disciple stood with Mary, and Jesus said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother,” and said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son” (John 19:26–28).