9 Quotes by Kate Braestrup

I can't make those two realities -- what I've lost and what I've found -- fit together in some tidy pattern of divine causality. I just have to hold them on the one hand and on the other, just like that.

A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.

Ah. I smiled. I'm not really here to keep you from freaking out. I'm here to be with you while you freak out, or grieve or laugh or suffer or sing. It is a ministry of presence. It is showing up with a loving heart.

It would be heretical, I suppose, to call Jesus fatherless, but might we admit that, as dads go, God was a little remote? Jesus was lucky to have Joseph, described and sanctified as a good man and a stand-up stepdad.

Ah. I smiled. I’m not really here to keep you from freaking out. I’m here to be with you while you freak out, or grieve or laugh or suffer or sing. It is a ministry of presence. It is showing up with a loving heart.

May the hungry be well fed. May the well fed hunger for justice. Amen.

Surprised by joy,” the theologian C. S. Lewis called it, and a cop who is finally snapping the handcuffs around the wrists of a dangerous and elusive perpetrator might know exactly what Lewis meant.

Trooper Drew Griffith was spiritual, which is to say that he had experiences of the numinous that were both spontaneous and deliberately cultivated. He engaged in a regular, deliberate practice within a chosen faith community in order to nurture his own spiritual development and to translate it into useful, loving social action. Drew was religious.

These days, cynicism seems uncomfortably close to despair, and I no longer believe that the only alternative to despair is blind denial. Despair isn’t realism, it is the apocalypticism of the clever unreligious and just as much an abdication of responsibility. Bad things happen but the world isn’t ending. No bang, no whimper, no sudden fix, just this long, slow slog we’re all taking together toward the next shining, inevitable miracle.