Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.
People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.
Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.
I’m not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I’m not going to carry that in my backpack.
Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.
On the spiritual path, all the dreck and misery is transformed, maybe not that same day, but still transformed into spiritual fuel or insight.
The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I’m not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.
I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.
Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.
When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation, it sometimes floats forth and opens.
You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.
I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.
I’m a terrible Christian and meditating is very hard for me, and I do it. I do it badly, like I do a lot of things. I believe in doing things badly.
Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.
And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.