Contrary to popular opinion, Christians are not nice polite people who never get angry with one another. Those are not the virtues of God's people. Our virtues are truth-telling, kindness, forgiveness and yes, even anger-as long as it is the anger that is part of true love-through which we move closer to one another and to the God who has shown us how it is done.

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

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 wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it's what is most real.

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.

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

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.