Notebook

Our growing is not yet over

‘May seekers of truth give life to those who are satisfied…

Where is hope?

As destruction, injury, homelessness, austerity, poverty and…

Do you know me?

Gérard was waiting at the window of one of the l’Arche houses for people with disabilities. He had been told that an “important gentleman” was coming for lunch.

The wonder of a birth

A bullock-cart, bearing a desperately thin but heavily pregnant woman, her anxious husband and an enormous tin trunk, wound its way laboriously up the steep hillside.

The dark night of the soul

"Your Grace, ... Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show himself - for there is such a terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead.".... "Ask Our Lord to give me courage." So wrote Mother Teresa to Ferdinand Périer, Archbishop of Calcutta on 18th March 1953.

A troubadour in a small boat

He was a gambler who, in his youth, lost everything he had on racehorses, a gentle, prayer-filled man whom Mother Teresa described as "very, very holy". As a priest he was later instrumental in founding a community of Brothers devoted to the service of the poorest of the poor. He shared their lives in Saigon, Cambodia and many other places of violence and suffering, and wrote sublimely of the "beautiful" unsung people he met along the way, whom he believed to be the hope of the world.