Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall. This is the way of life, and God alone knows how it works.

I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.

I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that's entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.