Grace cannot prevail...until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.

For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself-and it is our glory to see it so and to thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

Older women are like aging strudels - the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling has come at last into its own.

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.

The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn't seem like much to you, you're right: it isn't. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It's not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death.

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

Grace cannot prevail...until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.