There is but one creator, and “creating” is the very thing that artists cannot do.

“I have found my calling: my call is love,” and writes: “In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things . . .”

Gail Ramshaw has said, “Christianity requires metaphoric thinking,”

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn’t.

equal treatment does not translate into equality;

I should try telling my friends who have a hard time comprehending why I like to spend so much time going to church with Benedictines that I do so for the same reasons that I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry aloud, and to have the poetry and the wild stories of scripture read to me. To respond with others, in

These days, when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin, then, is an aberration, not natural to us at all.

This psalm functions as a cautionary tale: such a desire, left unchecked, whether buried under “niceness” or violently acted out, can lead to a bitterness so consuming that even the innocent are not spared.

“perfection consists in being what God wants us to be.”