And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.

The monk at St. Meinrad took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, ‘I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.

"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer." "That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them." "Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been."

I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.

If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.