There is something about that touch, that act of consecration, which turns a prayer into a pulse that ripples down to the toes. Just as God comes to us through water and wine, God comes to us through touch, through the holy acts of holy hands.Through touch, God gave us the power to injure or to heal, to wage war or to wash feet. Let us not forget the gravity of that. Let us not forget the call.

Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It's certainly not something resurrection people worry about.

I may be wrong, but I think the point is this: what each of us longs for the most is to be both fully known and fully loved. Miraculously, God feels the same way about us. God, too, wants to be fully known and fully loved.

I can't be a Christian on my own. Like it or not, following Jesus is a group activity, something we're supposed to do together...We're going to need each other's help.

When I get to those stories in the New Testament, I'm inclined to take the sophisticated approach and assume the people who had demons cast out of them were healed of mental illness of epilepsy...But lately I've been wondering if these something important out, something about the shape and nature of evil, which, as Alexander Schmemann puts it, is not merely an absence of good but "the presence of dark and irrational power.

But perhaps the most unsettling thing about a new church is the way the ghost of the old one haunts it. For better or worse, the faith of our youth informs our fears, our nostalgia, our reactions, and our suspicions.

In his testimony before his baptism, Andrew said, "I put off baptism because I felt like I was in a state of sin, like I wasn't good enough or fit enough to be baptized. But then I realized that baptism is done at the beginning of your faith journey, not the middle or the end. You don't have to have everything together to be baptized...You just have to grasp God's grace. God's grace is enough.

Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own. As my mother tried to tell me a million times, they weren't rejecting me for being different, they were rejecting me for being familiar, for calling out all those quiet misgivings most Christians keep hidden in the dark corners of their hearts and would rather not name.

I was so lonely in my questions and so desperate for companionship, I tried to force the people I loved to doubt along with me. I tried to make them understand...I was reckless at times, and self-absorbed, and I'm still mending some relationships as a result.