"...this is the spiritual journey, learning how to live in the meantime, between the last time you heard from God and the next time you hear from God." p. 25
"In order to find her coin, she had to sort and sweep through the clutter in her home. And that itself was as much a cause for celebration as finding the precious coin." p. 29
"We don't move on, we return wiser." p. 32
"Rituals are routines that force us to live faithfully, even when we no longer feel like being faithful. Until our heart has the time to arouse itself and find its way back to those we love, rituals make us show up for duty." p. 36
"The issue in prayer is not to pray because we are certain, but to pray because we are uncertain." p. 41
"Silence is just that - silence - a different way of getting me to listen and pay attention." p. 61
"Still, I've learned some things from this long affair with written prayers. For one thing, sometimes you have to pray the prayers you can until you can pray the prayer you want. Second, prayer is not so much learning to write or talk to someone or some presence outside yourself as becoming mindful of a conversation already taking place deep inside." p. 62
"We're never quite certain where we are headed, because arriving is not what matters. Going is what is important." p. 120
"the commission is the same, and that is to abandon everything - even the place we meant to be going. Those who wish to find themselves must first be willing to lose themselves." p. 121
"Some women wait for something
to change and nothing
does change
so they change themselves." - Audre Lorde p. 137
""Is today tomorrow?" the old woman asked no one in particular...I think of the old lady's question whenever I think I ought to be doing anything other than what I am doing at the time or ought to be somewhere other than where I am at the time." p. 150
"But labeling my failure to walk away from the church and ministry as fear is to miss the point. Attending church, preaching, officiating at the Communion table, and baptizing babies were precisely the things I had to do until belief returned." p. 161
"Rituals prove that we can be trusted to keep our appointment even when we aren't sure the other party will show up. They are done daily because the day is all there is." p. 165
"We clamor for glimpses of God as though we were actually suitable to have dealings with God." p. 173
"When God does appear, if ever God does again, it will be to leave us not with intimate knowledge about God but with a painful, exquisite insight into what it means to be human before a loving God." p. 174
"We rarely recognize what we ought to recognize at the moment we ought to recognize it." p. 185
"...for God to be in the shadows, inviting us to be vulnerable, to let down our guard, to relax, to trust the moment, is for God to be more than accessible." p. 186
"Sometimes when we're angry at God and galled at God's silence, the best we can manage to do is to confront God, confess our outrage, and risk speaking our minds." pp. 190-191
"It's in the remembering and telling of a story...that we find healing. Even inaccurate stories have the power to save us from despair." p. 194
"Put baldly: if God is not good, then why should I care that God is silent? God is probably doing me a favor and I don't even know it." p. 195
"Listening for God is just like that. It's a kind of listening that requires you to stop, be patient, stay around awhile, suffer the quiet, and learn how to listen for God speaking to us through children, through ceremonies, through cycles, through caretaking, through Communion, through cards, and through the circumstances of our lives." p. 200
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