The effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.

Humanity can be pretty stinky.

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.

The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn't felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.

Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.

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