Gravity and sadness yank us down, and hope gives us a nudge to help one another get back up or to sit with the fallen on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.
For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, Hello, Dearest. I’m so glad it’s you! I’ve come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even...
But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.
Are you born again? he asked, as we taxied down the runway. He was rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon. I did not know how to answer for a moment.Yes, I sa...
All these years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a ba...
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you h...
Being sober delivered almost everything drinking promised.
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. While others who have something to say or who want to be effectual, lik...
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over...
The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth.
….but at the same time, they got a miracle. It wasn’t the kind that comes on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float. And it wasn’t the one that they wanted, where God would reach down from the sky and touch...
By the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
Butterflies were wind energy made visible.
And you try to quiet your mind so you can hear...
You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confi...
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town
We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,
Vonnegut said, When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
Tom said either you learn to live with paradox and ambiguity or you'll be 6 years old for the rest of your life.
This is how we make important changes-- barely, poorly, slowly.