It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.

You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way.

I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening.

You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented.

The reason 'help' is such a great prayer is that God is the gift of desperation. When you're in despair, you're teachable.

Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.