If I'm going to continue to be any kind of spiritual teacher, I've got to go deeper myself. And so for me, [I am] preserving long periods of solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, writing. I don't turn on music or the TV unless I really need to.

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.

The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

The important thing is the willingness to give back the gift that is you, not the perfection of the gift itself. Can you feel the difference?

To keep the middle coming back, you can't say some radically conservative or radically progressive things. That's been the bane of organized religion. It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of the church as "two or three gathered in my name" is not still the best way.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity.