I'd like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all.

God is a spirit and converses with us in a quiet atmosphere because our minds are not capable of listening to his voice when they are filled with noise and confusion.

I love being in the garden, and my 'chilling-out room' is almost like being out there.

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life...

If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Be merciful to yourself, stop fighting yourself quite so much. Maybe what you are asking of yourself, what you're driving yourself to do or to be, what you put a gun to your own back to make yourself do, is something at this point you needn't have to think about doing. So, think back at the end of the day to the wars you're involved in. How are they going?

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks... It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there, powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.

It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer.

Solitude can be very rewarding and full of blessing because in the silence of the inner being, one finds God.

I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.