The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.

I found myself in a maze where I'd taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn't doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.

Humanity can be pretty stinky.

I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.

I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.

The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.