The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

The assumption behind any theology that I've ever been familiar with is that there is a profound beauty in being, simply in itself. Poetry, at least traditionally, has been an educing of the beauty of language, the beauty of experience, the beauty of the working of the mind, and so on. The pastor does, indeed, appreciate it.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.

We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.