“I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.”

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.

Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.

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.

Perfectionism is the counterfeit of excellence. Excellence is Kingdom, while perfectionism is religion. What ever you do, do it with all you might, and as unto the Lord. That is excellence.

you may be right, I may be crazy, but it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for

If nobody throws all their rules at you, you might make a song with no introduction.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression.

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.

So it’s a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what’s good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.

If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.