When you haven't found inner meaning, you will always substitute outer performance. It's the only way to fill that void, that sense of significance - that I am significant. So almost the degree of outer performance can, in many cases, mirror the lack of inner alignment.

If you're the head of the organization that has to pay salaries, bills and keep the money coming, you have to be concerned with pleasing the middle. I find it means you have to dumb down your message to something less radical than the gospel. It can't be the real gospel. It has to be "churchiness" that pleases everyone, so they come back next Sunday and keep putting money in the collection plate. I don't mean that in a cynical way. I just think it's what happens.

Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

Jesus is never upset at sinners; he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.