Desire is the straw that stirs the drink.

Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.

We get ready for death by beginning to live life as we should have been living it all along.

Becoming like Jesus is as much as about having a relaxed and joyful heart as it is about believing and doing the right thing, as much about proper energy as about proper truth.

We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.

Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.

Resiliency is the key to love.

The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.

Without making any moral judgements whatsoever, one can say that self-indulgence and excessive self-preoccupation are the antithesis of genuine awareness.

Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.

Spirituality is about what we do about the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros.

To trust in your own aliveness, in your own ability to sustain and be sustained - there are times when there is no greater act of defiance.

Question is not whom I am going to love, but question is whom I am going not to love.

As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone So to yield with life solves the insolvable: To yield I have learned is to come back again.

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation for when he is tried he shall receive the crown of life.

It would probably surprise people to know that I'm interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.

I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.

The church was made for mission-God's mission

I think the media is very much like the inside-the-Beltway crowd. They're not average Americans themselves. They're under a lot of pressure from editors and publishers.

I think I've been on a path ever since I was born, a path of high stress. I put myself, my career, it was a big old juicy carrot right in front of me for all of my life.

A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.