Like Art, Religion Is An Imaginative And

And Sometimes It's The Very Otherness Of A Stranger, Someone Who Doesn't Belong To Our Ethnic Or Ideological Or Religious Group, An Otherness That Can Repel Us Initially, But Which Can Jerk Us Out Of Our Habitual Selfishness, And Give Us Intonations Of That Sacred Otherness, Which Is God.

And So, One Of The Reasons Why I Started My Charter For Compassion, Was To Bring The Golden Rule Back To The Center Of Religion And Morality And Not Put Other's Secondary Goals, Less Demand Goals, Into The Forefront.

Pain Is Something That's Common To Human Life. When We Ignore It, We Aren't Engaging In The Whole Reality, And The Pain Begins To Fester.

I Had Tried, As I Thought As A Nun, To Open Myself To God And God Seemed Totally Uninterested In Me. The Heavens Remained Closed And Opaque. I Now Realize, Of Course, That I Had A Very, Very Inadequate Idea Of God. I Was Expecting Clouds To Part, A Little Sort Of Whisper In My Ear, And Of Course, That's Not What God Is. God Is Not Another Being; We Are Talking About Something Much More Profound.

Religions Don't Own Compassion; It Is A Human Virtue.