We can talk about motherhood. We can talk about the Gospel. But both stand beyond talking, beyond words. They’re a dying in living, a dying to live.

Our task is not to judge the branches of the vine.

There is much more to life and discipleship than death, yet death determines the final meaning of both.

Intimacy and the honest pleasures of the flesh will not fade away.

Whatever else sin is, it is always a forgetting that we are loved by God. And the more we sin, the more we forget.

Louise Glück’s poem, “Wild Iris,” begins with a description of death, the sort of death something made of earth and growing there might recount if it could speak.