“The only people who get better are people who know that, if they never get better, God will love them anyway.”

“Not being changed by prayer is sort of life standing in the middle of a spring rain without getting wet. It's hard to stand in the center of God's acceptance and love without getting it all over you.”

“If there is no laughter, Jesus has gone somewhere else. If there is no joy and freedom, it is not a church: it is simply a crowd of melancholy people basking in a religious neurosis. If there is no celebration, there is no real worship.”

“The good news is that Christ frees us from the need to obnoxiously focus on our goodness, our commitment, and our correctness. Religious has made us obsessive almost beyond endurance. Jesus invited us to a dance...and we've turned in into a march of soldiers, always checking to see if we're doing it right and are in step and in line with the other soldiers. We know a dance would be more fun, but we believe we must go through hell to get to heaven, so we keep marching.”

“...a priest is someone willing to stand between a God and a people who are longing for one another's love, turning back and forth between them with no hope of tending either as well as each deserves. To be a priest is to serve a God who never stops calling people to do more justice and love more mercy, and simultaneously to serve people who nine times out of ten are just looking for a safe place to rest. To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.”

“Holding a grudge & harboring anger/resentment is poison to the soul. Get even with people...but not those who have hurt us, forget them, instead get even with those who have helped us.”

“...all the thousands of God's children who have flung themselves, stupid and glorious, over and over, into the best and worst of things, loving whom they should not, seizing what they must not, running where they cannot, falling where there is no one to catch them - how this serves the betterment or edification of the species is not clear; people do it regardless. People have always done it.”