If what makes you happy is going out and living it up and spending all your money on wine, women, and song, the world doesn't need that. But on the other hand, if you give your life to good works - you go and work in a leper colony and it doesn't make you happy - the chances are you're not doing it very well.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.

My prayer is spasmodic, occasional, desperate. It has a great deal to do with my children's physical well-being - that when they're traveling in the air the plane not crash, things like that.

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.

... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

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.