Betrayal

"People who live together can be sources of great sorrow for one another.  When Jesus chose his twelve apostles, Judas was one of them.  Judas was called a traitor. A traitor, according to the literal meaning of the Greek word for "betraying" is someone who hands the other over to suffering.

"The truth is that we all have something of the traitor in us because each of us hands our fellow human beings over to suffering somehow, somewhere, mostly without intending or even knowing it. Many children, even grown up children, can experience deep anger toward their parents for having protected them too much or too little.

"When we are willing to confess that we often hand those we love over to suffering, even against our best intentions, we will be more ready to forgive those who, mostly against their will, are causes of our pain."

-Henri Nouwen

Why Focus on Spirituality?

"What is the use of living for things that you cannot hold on to, values that crumble in your hands as soon as you possess them, pleasures that turn sour before you have begun to taste them, and a peace that is constantly turning into war?  Men have not become Trappists merely out of a hope for peace in the next world: something has told them, with unshakable conviction that the next world begins in this world and that heaven can be theirs now, very truly, even though imperfectly, if they give their lives to the one activity which is the beatitude of heaven.

"That activity is love: the clean, unselfish love that does not live on what it gets but on what it gives; a love that increases by pouring itself out for others, that grows by self-sacrifice and becomes mighty by throwing itself away."
  -Thomas Merton