This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did – or, worse, to justify why I didn’t do something else – is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. Andrew Weil in his book Healthy Aging, are “key determinants of how we age.” They can threaten the quality of time we bring to the present.

But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.

Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not.

For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of “God with us” at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of “God with us” in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well.

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn’t what happens to us that counts. It’s what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference.

These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young – to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care about those things anymore” – is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.

Spirituality is not meant to be a panacea for human pain. Nor is it a substitute for critical conscience. Spirituality energizes the soul to provide what the world lacks.