"If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer."

"God himself does not give answers. He gives himself."

"Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me."

"If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving."

"You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own."

"Listen to your life. All moments are key moments."

"Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you."

"Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp."

"... in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all"

"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough."

"The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all"

"Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life..."

"You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary"

"The life thatI touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."

"Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens."

"He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last."

"It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship."

"Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed"

"The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around."

"There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth."

"The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment."

"What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup."

"Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,' the good thief said from his cross. (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"... 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..."

"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?"

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die."

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

"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."

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

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

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

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