One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

Usually if you pray from the heart, you get an answer—the phone rings or the mail comes, and light gets in through the cracks, so you can see the next right thing to do. That's all you need.

We learn from pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can't find the door. Yet maybe if you ask God for help in knowing which direction to face, you'll have a moment of intuition. Maybe you'll see at least one next right step you can take.

Every one of us sometimes needs a tour guide to remind us how big and deep life is meant to be.

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying.

Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer - please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.

I would rarely be in conformity with the Divine's huge, crazy love so I just prayed, Help me start walking in your general direction, and the greatest prayer, Help me not be such an asshole.

You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn't quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake's radiance, which would be my preference. The sky had shifted

God gives us Her own self. Left to my own devices, I would prefer answers. This is why it is good that I am in charge of so little: the pets, the shopping, the garden.

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)