Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

It is impossible to conceive how different things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did for millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. It is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him.

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Snobs are people who look down on other people, but that does not justify our looking down on them. Who can say what dark fears of being inferior lurk behind their superior airs or what they suffer in private for the slights they dish out in public?

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.

What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.