To recover a spiritual tradition in which creation, and the study of creation, matters would be to inaugurate new possibilities between spirituality and science that would shape the paradigms for culture, its institution, and its people.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . . . Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it.

Faith takes us to deep places, to the ruptures in our self-confidence and our lives. Do not settle for spiritual comfort all the time...Darkness is divine also. Faith is not about positive thinking so much as about what kicks in when we are weak, sick, and short of self-confidence. The via positiva never stands alone. The via negativa is always with us on our faith journey as well.

The whole purpose of letting pain be pain is this: to let go of pain. By entering into it, we see that we are strong enough and capable enough to move through it. We find out that it ultimately has a gift for us.

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

I turn a lot of stuff down - big, big movies, the kind I wouldn't want to go to the cinema to see.