Pope Francis says the name of God is mercy. Our name was mercy, too, until we put it away to become more productive, more admired and less vulnerable. We tend to forget it's still there.
I heard an old man speak once, someone who had been sober for fifty years, a very prominent doctor. He said that he’d finally figured out a few years ago that his profound sense of control, in the wor...
Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean...The...
And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me.
And I’d stand there trying to see it, the way you try to remember a dream, where you squint and it’s right there on the tip of your psychic tongue but you can’t get it back. The image is gone. That is...
Why do we make it all seem like a crisis, over and over again? Why do we worry it all to death, like dogs with socks or chew-toys? 'Look at it this way...In a hundred years? - All new people.
So does our writing matter, again? they ask.Because of the spirit, I say. Because of the heart. Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life...
I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask a...
I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked.
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.
Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.
I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds — the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in b...