The you must be there for the I to find itself. Trust in you gives me trust in myself. In the encounter between the you and the I, faith is born. I a… - David Steindl-Rast

Nothing is more significant in Jesus’ parables than his appeal to Common Sense. What a pity that this term has been abused to mean no more than sweet reasonableness or, worse, public opinion. Rightly understood, it means the deep awareness that all have in common and from which anything sensible must flow. We could even say that Common Sense is God’s Holy Spirit in the human heart. And here Jesus differs from the prophets. They appealed to the authority of God as standing behind them — 'Thus speaks the Lord God. …' Jesus, in contrast, appeals to Common Sense, to the authority of God in the hearts of his hearers. No wonder the people felt empowered. 'This man speaks with authority,' they said, and they added, 'not like the Scribes' (Mark 1:22), not like the authorities of cultural religion. ... As the very opposite to conventional thinking, Common Sense was, and still is, subversive to authoritarian structures and intolerable to their religious as well as political representatives.

Monastic contemplatives have staked out a clearly limited area to be transformed by contemplation: the monastery. Lay contemplatives face the challenge of transforming the whole world.

Now when I say that this has something to do with the child in us, I mean that there is in the child a longing to find a meaning, an openness to meaning which tends to be lost or at least overshadowed by our preoccupation with purposefulness. I should say right at the outset that when I use these two terms, purpose and meaning, I’m by no means playing off purpose against meaning or meaning against purpose. However, in our time and in our culture we are so preoccupied with purpose that one really has to bend backward and overemphasize the dimension of meaning; otherwise we will be lopsided. So if you find an extraordinary amount of emphasis on meaning, it is only to redress the balance.