Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost - his or her wildest, most messed-up children - the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.

I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.

Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.

When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens like one of those fluted Japanese blossoms, flimsy and spastic, bright and warm. This almost always seems to happen in community.