St. Bernard of Clairvaux said in his book of considerations for his disciple, Pope Eugene: ‘Try to drink from your own well,’ that is, from your own humanity. If you are honest with yourself and begin to see in yourself what the faith is, with your human experience in this time, drinking from your own well, as St. Bernard says, then you’ll be able to say to others what needs to be said. In this sense, it seems important to me to be really attentive to the world of today, but also to be attentive to the Lord in myself: to be a man of this time, and at the same time a believer in Christ, who in himself transforms the eternal message into a contemporary message.

(Benedict XVI, Q&A With Priests of Rome, 26 Feb 2009)