“Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.”

“We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly.”

“We must let go of any fantasy concerning the church as a stable, predictable, well-regulated organization. If the church is truly the place in the world where the existence of God is brought to the level of narrative discernment, the the church will always be disorderly.…We must let go of the desire for theology to be a finished product of complete conceptual symmetry. If theology is in fact the attempt to understand living faith, then it must always be an unfinished process, for the data continues to come in, as the Living God persists in working through the lives of people and being revealed in their stories.…We must let go of any pretense of closing the New Testament within some comprehensive, all-purpose, singular reading which reduces its complexity to simplicity. We must recognize our attempts to reduce multiplicity to unity. We must recognize our tendency to seek a stable package of meaning that we can then apply to other situations or fit within our systematic theological constructs, so that, ideally, we need never really read the texts again.”

“I say to myself, go on seeking, be glad for being sensitive, be glad you're able to go beyond the resistance inside you. It is our resistance to what we experience that makes creativity possible. So don't get rid of resistance like that by going around it or trying to eliminate it. Our own limitations put up strong resistance, but it's because of that that we are creators”

“Where there is light, there must be shadow, where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.... We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago-- from a time before good and evil even existed, when people's minds were still benighted.”

“to see beauty is to learn the private language of meaning which is another's life - to recognize and relish what is. beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?”