Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.

For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.

It is Christ who shows that unless a person's pain is understood, one will never understand a person's soul. He Himself is the best reminder of the reward of chasing truth versus chasing shadows.

We have lost the shared meanings of pain, and so the shared meanings of victory become occasions for jealousy.

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

After all, what is a liver? My father, for example, died of cancer of the liver and was never sick a day in his life up till the moment it killed him. Never felt a twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I hated my father. Lust for my mother, you know.

Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler.

The Holy Spirit showed me that when I put up walls to keep others out I also wall myself into solitary place of confinement.

It is very helpful for us to remember that "hurting people hurt people." I don't think very many people wake up every day with the thought in mind of purposely seeing how much they can hurt everyone in their life, yet that is often exactly what they do. Why? Usually because they are hurting and have unresolved issues in their own life.

Grief is an element of aliveness and the answer to the denial the market demands of us. It is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other. It is a communal practice that recognizes that choosing the wilderness of vulnerability, mystery, and anxiety was a good and life-affirming choice.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.

The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.