In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

My job [as a teacher] is to love the Scriptures in public. And then sit down.

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.