“Jesus invites us to welcome the lost who repent back into their proper place in the kingdom of God’s grace. We must pray ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. The goodies must welcome the repentant baddies, or they will not be goodies at all.”

“A combination of nature and wound imprints in us the belief that any gift, not least love and forgiveness, needs to be merited. In this life, no free meal! In religion, no free grace!”

“Sin is its own punishment and virtue is its own reward. At the end of the day, nothing feels better than virtue and nothing feels worse than sin.”

“It is part of the irrationality of human beings but it is also something we all know we would do. We grieve over lost things, more than we take joy in the things we have.”

“Wars begin and end in the human heart. That is where we have to go, inside of ourselves, and that is where we will find God. Then we can rejoice, then the party begins.”

“Justice gives us what we deserve, love can give us more than we deserve. This is no glib truth, and the reaction of the older brother shows that it can be hard to accept and be glad about.”

“We do not create the Church. We are drawn, called and sought into unity by the Trinity working through and in us. We have to shift away from any views of superiority in what is acceptable for those who are in the process of coming to God’s Church.”

“In God’s mercy, and through Jesus seeking us, we can re-enter the heritage given to us and we can look to the future in hope”

“What is precious to God, precious to Jesus, must be precious to us too, or we will never be holy”

“In the end, it is because we are wounded and bitter that we worry about God’s justice, worry that it might be too lenient, worry that the bad will not be fully punished, worry that there might not be a hell”

“if we allow ourselves to be embraced by that love, maybe if we have the gift of the courage of the younger brother we'll find that we are in an incredible position to help other people”

“If we can just sink into our hearts, everybody, that God is “pazzo d’amore”, he's, he's crazy in love with us then, then we be willing and able to respond with an equally extravagant gift of love”

“God's nature is nurture”

“If we were caught in a strict logic of justice, God help all of us, we'd all be lost. Thank God that we have a God that is indeed just but who is above all a God of love and a God of grace.”

“I know it might sound strange or counterintuitive. God does not need our moral excellence. God is not diminished by our moral depravity.”

“Mercy and impunity are not the same thing, nor are nonviolence and passivity. Christ was never vengeful. He rejected punitive justice. But his mercy never sacrificed truth. Christian nonviolence seeks to interrupt and transform violence.”

“Forgiveness stops the power of sin in the person who sins AND in those who are affected by the sin. It replaces the power of evil with the power of Truth, Compassion, and Fidelity.”

“Let us notice that the Father does not run after the son to the far country and pull him out of the muck. There is an act of repentance and renunciation that we must undertake before we can return to the Father. We do have to leave the pig sty.”

“Let us not pretend that all is well with us. We are all lost and must give God the chance to find us.”

“How common it is today to hear religious discourse or doctrine transformed into absolute idols that enslave others with violent images of God, rather than imperfect and ever-changing invitations to the freeing mercy of God”

“God’s mercy fills us when we come back to Him, and it overflows when we have mercy on others”

“The feast we are invited to is the Father’s heavenly banquet, where Jesus is the ‘Fatted Calf, of the parable, now in reality the lamb of sacrifice offered for the sins of humanity, once and for all, at the Last Supper and on the Cross of Calvary.”

“See, God operates in myriad ways depending on the situation of his children. He finds, he carries, he welcomes. And in each case he rejoices.”

“This is what incarnation means. Our God breaks these social differences, divisions, stratifications because he has come with his relentless mercy to seek out precisely us sinners.”