Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for 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 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.

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

The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.

I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them.

I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.