Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.

What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.

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.

Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don't get to meet some of the people who love God back.