Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.

I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."

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

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

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.

Because I'm a "strong person," the symptoms hit me by surprise. It was, as I write in the book, stinging in my eyes after Sunday that I thought was an allergy, until one day I sat in the car and decided to just let my eyes tear up so that whatever was in them would come out, and what came out were tears that wouldn't stop. It was literally a physical reaction that was my first indication there was anything wrong.

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