Vocation is the place where the world’s greatest need and a person’s greatest joy meet.
The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments.
Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
The Jesus who is the one whom we search for even when we do not know that we are searching and hide from even when we do not know that we are hiding.
We have God’s joy in our blood.
We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.
Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.
If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell it.
If our pain doesn’t destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.
The best moments any of us have as human beings are those moments when for a little while it is possible to escape the squirrel-cage of being me into the landscape of being us.
We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.
The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.
If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.
I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.
To be bored to death is a form of suicide.
The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.
God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.