"Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

"This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know."

"When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia."

"One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God."

"It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon."

"With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards."

"The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."

"Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men."

"So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up to flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear."

"To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge."

"O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen"

"Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?"

"... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both..."

"You have to suffer in order to be beautiful."

"If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths."

"In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us."

"To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift."

"Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical."

"What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us."

"It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence."

"There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three."

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet."

"God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible."

"Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true."