To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won’t be afraid of death because you’re experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world.

I decided years ago that if I'm going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.

Nature religions, for example, speak of summer, fall, winter, and spring. They see the downward path as the necessary prelude to any kind of upward path again. Our vocabulary is different. We Christians speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But unfortunately, we've projected it all onto Jesus and it didn't become a life agenda for the rest of us.

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.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

Many people I know who are doing truly helpful and healing ministry find their primary support from a couple of enlightened friends, and only secondarily, if at all, from the larger organizations.