The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong. Silence can be a system of peace, which is mercy, easily offered to a friend needing quiet, harder when the person is one's own annoying self.

Life is like a nice fresh batch of Swiss cheese. Note to self: savor the holes, too, like the spaces between musical notes.

Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.

Prayer usually means praise, or surrender, acknowledging that you have run out of bullets.

Whether it's Mt. Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, a liveness, or whatever you want to call it, the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgement, separation from life in yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are - truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.

The Amen is only as good as the attitude. If you are trying to finish up quickly so you can check your cell phone messages, you are missing the chance to spend quiet moments with the giver of life and the eternal, which means you may reap continued feelings of life racing along without you. So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more honesty, breathing more, deeper, and with more attention.

So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.

Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. T. S. ELIOT

It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do.

My elderly priest friend Terry says, "Don't try harder—resist less.

Whether it's Mount Sinai, a pasture, a library, the creek down the road, aliveness (or whatever you want to call it) the song is above us, around us, within us. We transcend the incessant and wearying yammer of bullshit. Transcendence means you go from judgment, separation from life and yourself, to feeling at one-ish with the universe. We hook into something bigger than we are, truer than the self-serving stories we make up about life and ourselves.

Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.