And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.

Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.

If you know you have been forgiven, you will forgive and reconcile with others.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

Our memories are our own, and we cannot blame anything or anyone in the past for any pain dwelling there. If we open the door to them or keep hashing over past incidents in our minds, we have only ourselves to blame.

We cannot serve the Lord if we don't have a heart of forgiveness.

It is said that resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die. There is no room for such a waste of energy in the service of God.

Forgiveness is the final form of love.

Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether you are Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Jewish. Forgiveness is one of the patterns that is always true, it is part of The Story. There is no specifically Catholic way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth.

The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history.