Our lives are a story, dear friends, a pilgrimage in which, hopefully, we grow to spiritual maturity, where we experience inner peace and joy, serenity, in trustfulness, in self-forgetting to self-transcendence. We are invited to surrender to the Holy Mystery together -- in loving communion with one another allowing the Spirit to make us one ... As long as we journey, as long as we are pilgrims and shaping our stories, we cherish the silence at the end of our activity and in the midst of our prayer, where the Holy One is present to be reverenced in mystery and loved in truth.
Real faith is rooted in a basic unknowing about ultimate things, and religion helps us to be in relation to that mystery. This kind of unknowing can offer calm or create anxiety, depending on a person's faith. Often people fill in this emptiness by insisting that they possess the truth. The fragility of their faith is betrayed by their strident insistence on being right and by their efforts to force their views on others. They seem afraid of the very things that define religion: mystery and trust.