I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.

I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing.

Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do

My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature.

I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days,

A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

My father always said when someone dies the body is just a suit of old clothes the spirit doesn’t want anymore.

He was just afire with old certainties, and he couldn’t bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace and by the aging of his body and by the forgetfulness that had settled over everything. He thought we should all be living at a dead run.