...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.

I don't go to church all that regularly, and one reason I don't is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. I find myself being addressed by preachers who, I assume, were led by some initial passion for Christ, for the truth, for God, for "the More." That's what got them there. But that has gotten buried under all the debris of having to run a church, of concerns.

It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

It is not the objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.

In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.