The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?

The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?

We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time.

9/11 allowed us to witness the ordinary face of goodness in the love that those about to die brought with them to work that day. It is fitting that we refer to a large segment of the church year as Ordinary Time because it describes the look of the true faith that, as we read of the Kingdom, is spread about us.

9/11 revealed that those about to die do not seem afraid or plead for forgiveness for their sins, if they think about them at all. They all have one thing in mind - those they love - and they all do the same thing: They call them up - spouses, family or friends - to tell them they love them.

As dutiful bishops soon discover, authoritarianism, or control from the top down, characterizes the hierarchical tradition.

As in the Divine Right of Kings, hierarchies invest those who preside at the top of their pyramidal structure with absolute power to rule over the lesser ranks that spread down like a marble staircase to the broad foundation stones of those with no power at all.

Bishops may often feel but cannot express the sting and throb of submitting themselves to Roman commands because the latter are always presented as tests of their loyalty to the Pope and of their absolute acceptance of his teaching authority, or Magisterium.

Friendship is something whose depth fits human aspirations and fulfills human possibilities. It has heft to it, as a gold-piece does and a gambling chip does not.

From his first hours as pope, Francis has re-enacted or spoken of the great pastoral transformation of Vatican II as his own agenda.

Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed.

Hierarchical formulations died because their wedding cake levels posited a multiply fractured cosmos that does not match the Space Age revelation of a unified universe in which the earth is clearly in, rather than separated from, the heavens. Hierarchical representations do not reflect what either the world or we are like.

Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

If you ask people what attracted them to the person they love, they never tell you of some perfect feature that focused them on sheer surfaces but rather an imperfection that allowed them to see into their uncharted depths.

In April, God speaks to us in the seas whose rhythmic murmuring fills our ears from a long way off. It was in April that the Titanic went down into the deep to lie like a slasher's victim, bleeding the 'debris field' - its passengers' personal possessions, the everyday things of everyman and everywoman - across the ocean's floor.

Most ecclesiastical relics are fixed in time at the moment of their manufacture. That is why they are offered for veneration in casings that resemble pocket watches. They have lost their claim to mystery because they are so clearly the products of time.

Our human experience, like the World War II Ultra code-breaking machine, catches the heavy traffic of messages about what we really do and what is done to us every day.

Pope Francis has aimed a blow at what the whole hierarchical system is built on: a graded system with the higher clergy in the skyboxes, the devoted religious in festival seating, as they say of the crowds at rock concerts, and, on the bottom, the laity in standing room only.

St. Pope John XXIII called for the Second Vatican Council because he understood, as no Holy Father had in a long time, religion spoke to and found its language and symbols - its entire sense of the sacramental nature of existence - in the imagination that reveals not just the penalties of living, but the wonder and awe of our existence.

The object of religion is the imagination, that deep and inexhaustible font of our understanding and symbolizing our deepest possibilities.

The priesthood is not dying, but the clerical state is dead. It needs to be buried, preferably with a Viking funeral in Boston Harbor so nobody can miss the spectacle of its passing.

The seminary of the future must relate itself to flesh-and-blood men, or it provides a framework that only talks about the people of God but never really shares life with them.

The truth of faith is a slender, glowing element that runs through even the seemingly ordinary and undramatic moments of existence. Even at low intensity, it is a steady source of illumination. Such religious truth is powerful even when it seems faint, even when it seems obscured by the larger events of history.

The world, more suffering than sinning, turns toward Pope Francis as in a conversation people turn to the person who is making sense of things.

There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.

We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

The perception of the horizon is an earthbound event all horizons disappear in space and we are left shorn of the sweet roots that have held us to the earth challenged to imagine what is truly present just before us a unified and seemingly limitless universe.

There are times when silence is the most sacred of responses.

Friendship is essentially a partnership.

The friendship that can cease has never been real.

One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.

Although the troops have struck us, we throw it all behind and are glad to meet you in peace and friendship.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

A friendship that like love is warm; A love like friendship, steady.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.

It may be a cold, clammy thing to say, but those that treat friendship the same as any other selfishness seem to get the most out of it.

It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.

Opposition is true friendship.

The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?

Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

I am proud to represent these men and women who empower people in developing nations and promote the Peace Corps mission of peace and friendship. These volunteers are making major strides to improve the lives of people and communities around the world.

To some it may be a thrill to be known, to me it's a thrill to start a friendship even up.

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life.

The building of friendship, family, community and love is complicated. We are so isolated in this country, no longer supported by tribes and villages.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.