If we...can see the issues of our day—the poverty, the racism, war and injustice—and if we can use the skills and resources that we get from our training at school or on the job, and if we can really be open to being equipped by the Spirit of God, then we will be used. We must lie on our beds at night and wrestle with how we can individually and collectively bring our faith from talk to power, how we can bring our faith and works to bear on the real issues of human need. I believe that right now we are facing a most difficult time in history. We are discovering that old strategies have failed and that the new ones, or rediscovered ones, will not let us hold onto our old lifestyles.
God's grace and attraction touch the human person at the most vulnerable points of existence. Response to this movement in our hearts leads us to compassion, joy, celebration and forgiveness. The heart is that which can be attracted, touched, moved, acted upon. It is called affective, able to be affected, inasmuch as it is drawn and does not move under its own power. Those who act from the heart, moved by God to compassion, become signs of God's love and tenderness. This is the significance of the affirmation that the person is the heart. Created in the image of God, a God who is all love and compassion, we act in harmony with our nature when we manifest the qualities of the heart that are revealed to us in weakness, not in our strength. The seeds of the divine life within and the capacities of the human heart are found in weakness. A blessed weakness this human heart!