“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.”

I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

I found myself in a maze where I’d taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn’t doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.

Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.

Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.

I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God’s best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.

To be fully human is perhaps why I’m Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.

I don’t miss the ministry, because I’m completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.

The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.

They become nothing more than the kiss of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh.

I’m kind of glad that I was able to properly grow up before becoming a massive movie star.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

Obviously there was Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe, but Howard was on the brink of becoming a famous director – it didn’t happen because he died.

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.