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.

…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.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.After that I liked jazz music.Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.

After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn't handle the full brunt of reality.

I want you to understand that God has never been nor will ever be invented. He is not a product of any sort of imagination... Don't complain about the way God answers your prayers...Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled.

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

Reality is like a fine wine,” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.