This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

community can mean a household, a local body, a shared identity that stretches across the globe. But it also can mean a group that knows your name, people who know you and know about the ugly parts of you and stay.

To have the audacity to be and love and know yourself in a world content to have you live your days in hiding—this is bliss.

Still, it is not unusual to want to wish our own stories away. To discard the painful ones, the humiliating ones, and preserve only triumphs and satisfaction. But liberation cannot be found by tearing holes into oneself.

As joy gives way to dreaming, our hope becomes more and more secure. We begin to believe that what is will not always be, that the ache will not always linger. And we may even begin to believe that we are worthy of what we are hoping for.

Mine is a joy born not of laughter but of peace. This is okay.

A spirituality that depends on positivity will lead not only to emotional fallacies but also eventually to delusions of all kinds.

But in the end, it is much easier to locate love in rage than in apathy.

Ask me what I want to be, but not before you ask me who I want to be. Ask me who I want to be, but not before you ask me the more searing question of who I am.

More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop.