I Think I Am Like Most People

She Conceived Of Life As A Road Down Which One Traveled, An Easy Enough Road Through A Broad Country, And That One's Destination Was There From The Very Beginning, A Measured Distance Away, Standing In The Ordinary Light Like Some Plain House Where One Went In And Was Greeted By Respectable People And Was Shown To A Room Where Everything One Had Ever Lost Or Put Aside Was Gathered Together, Waiting.

This Morning The World By Moonlight Seemed To Be An Immemorial Acquaintance I Had Always Meant To Befriend. If There Was Ever A Chance, It Had Passed. Strange To Say, I Feel A Little That Way About Myself.

For Me Writing Has Always Felt Like Praying Even When I Wasn't Writing Prayers.

Anybody Who Has Read Any Biblical Scholarship Knows That Every Scholar Struggles Over Completely Intractable Problems With The Original Texts, Or What They Have To Work From. It's One Of The Great, Powerful, Mysterious Objects That Have Come Down Through History. This Does Not Translate Into Literal Interpretation For Me.

A Sermon Is A Form That Yields A Certain Kind Of Meaning In The Same Way That, Say, A Sonnet Is A Form That Deals With A Certain Kind Of Meaning That Has To Do With Putting Things In Relation To Each Other, Allowing For The Fact Of Complexity Reversal, Such Things. Sermons Are, At Their Best, Excursions Into Difficulty That Are Addressed To People Who Come There In Order To Hear That.