So you choose him?''Cal betrayed me, and I betrayed him. And you betrayed us both, in a thousand different ways.' The words are heavy as stone but right. So right. 'I choose no one.

Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions.

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin'Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde

Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.

Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

We witness the miracle of redemption together with people of like passion

Be an instrument of redemption, there are still unreached people

It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.

Is there any riches like redemption?

Redemption in Christ Jesus is the grace rebirth.

It is better to seek redemption than chase riches.