"tragedy always comes. not the losing-your-homework kind or the having-to-flush-your-goldfish kind, but the kind that leaves you stripped. the kind that tears from you all the ideas about living you once believed untearable."

"the fall has made monkeys out of us for crying outloud. some of us are athletes, some are physicists, and some of us are good-looking and some of us are rich, and we are all running around, in a way, trying to get people to clap for us, trying to get a bunch of people to say that we are normal, we are healthy, we are good. often when i want someone to like me, i am really wanting them to say that i am redeemed, that i am not a loser, that i can stay in the boat, stay in this circus, that my act redeems me."

"growing up in a small conservative church in the South, you hear more about morality than you do about Christ. if you were immoral, if you danced, drank, or cussed, you were made to feel that God no longer liked you. and if you were moral, you were made not to feel one with Christ, but right and good and better than other people. these things were not stated directly, but the enviroment left me with this impression. christian spirituality, then, hinged on whether or not a person behaved. what good does it do to tell someone to be moral if fifty years later they can die and, apparently, go to hell?"


just some of my feelings as of late...