Discipleship

“...to follow Jesus is not for the fragile, the timid, the self-centered.
To return his love is to love as he loved: intelligently and passionately, freely and with every fiber of your being.
To love as he loved is to care as he cared:
not for a misty mass called humanity,
but for every sister and brother who crosses your path;
not simply those you like and who like you,
but those you dislike on sight,
those who have no socially redeeming qualities,
the weirdos,
those who live and think and even sin differently from you.

More than anything else, to love as he loved is to care for the sheep that limp:
those who hunger for bread or justice or love;
those who have no pillow for their head,
no shoulder for their troubled heart;
those who are imprisoned behind bars or within their tortured selves."

Father Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.