Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.

The truth is that progress is usually small and sneaky.

A priest friend of mine has cautioned me away from the standard God of our childhoods, who loves you and guides you and then, if you are bad, roasts you: God as a high school principal in a gray suit who never remembered your name but is always leafing unhappily through your files.

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

I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.