“As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.

I’m a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like “Christian.”

For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.

Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children…At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.

Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.

I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I’ll capitalize both of those R’s, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it’s what is most real.

The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn’t felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

That’s enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that’s what led to my downward spin.

I’ve got a hold of something that won’t move. It’s a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.

If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I’ve just quit being religious, because that’s what got me into such deep trouble.

Our waiting is not nothing. It is something — a very big something — because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.