Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others, it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension.

I just think it would be easier to trust God if I had extra money to trust him with.

…more than a half million books, all of them smelling like dust and ink, two terrible smells that blend mystically to make something beautiful. Powells is another church to me, a paperback sort of heaven.

Anybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn't Jesus' fault.

What I believe is not what I say I believe, what I believe is what I do.

I liked the idea of loving people just to love them, not to get them to come to church.

God has never withheld love to teach me a lesson.

All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.

I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality