I could become like that dyslexic agnostic in the old joke - the one who lies in bed and tries to figure out if his dog exists.

I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.

When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.

The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours; it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.

I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy - a little bashed joy, here or there, or being mildly disgruntled.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.