"The task is not to find the lovable object, but to find the object before you lovable—whether given or chosen—and to be able to continue finding this one lovable, no matter how that person changes. To love is to love the person one sees."
"When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed."
"The story of Jesus is the story I'm willing to risk being wrong about."
“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”
"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."
"Know it well, love was God's meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did God reveal to you? Love. Why does God reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. And you will never know different, without end."
"Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald."
Orthodoxy is idolatry if it means holding the 'correct opinions about God'—'fundamentalism' is the most extreme and salient example of such idolatry—but not if it means holding faith in the right way, that is, not holding it at all but being held by God, in love and service. Theology is idolatry if it means what we say about God instead of letting ourselves be addressed by what God has to say to us. Faith is idolatrous if it is rigidly self-certain but not if it is softened in the waters of 'doubt.'"
"I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious anti-neighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation."
"I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."
"As I understand it, into the heart of every Christian, Christ comes, and Christ goes. When, by his Grace, the landscape of the heart becomes vast and deep and limitless, then Christ makes His abode in that graceful heart, and His Will prevails. The experience is recognized as Peace. In the absence of this experience much activity arises, divisions of every sort. Outside of the organizational enterprise, which some applaud and some mistrust, stands the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality."
"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save the environment."
"As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
"None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it."
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
"Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol."