Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.

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.

Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.

Your calling is where your own greatest joy intersects with the needs of the world.

The incarnation is “a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word "God," at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.