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.

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.

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.

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

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.

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

Humanity can be pretty stinky.