So here we are. Gulya instructs me how to turn Maggie without trampling her. You have to take short steps when she is turning, she explains. Yes, the dance has a structure, but we have to accommodate ourselves to one another. Dancing isn’t just steps, it’s you and your partner.

Faith wasn’t always without question. Faith wasn’t always so accepting, so joyful in its major key, its seven-note intervals. Once, doubt was desired, not just as a frame of mind but also as a bodily state. Prayer was an uncertain call to a God who might live anywhere, whose existence didn’t matter so much as the question that reverberated through flesh. Prayer was communication without resolution, felt only in the dropped notes flickering through the body.

I do not want to be a good person. I want to be a holy person.

Witnessing an unusual birth, living on a farm, rubbing shoulders with hippies, growing and raising our own food: It all sounds so romantic and interesting when I describe it, doesn’t it?

I never thought I would be a smoker. When I was young—maybe five or six—I hid in a closet and sobbed after seeing my mom light a cigarette in the kitchen of a friend’s house.

Franz Wright struggled with alcohol and drugs his entire difficult life, so the bad behavior had its source. But I also think that, in Wright’s case, the personal suffering that led to his outlandish behavior is related to problems at the heart of modern poetry.

On one level this is a story about vocation—a baptism by electricity—but it is also a story about time and eternity, death and resurrection—themes that would preoccupy Bradbury over a writing career that spanned seven decades.

The great director’s question in the film essay—a technique quite innovative for its time—was the old conundrum of what is real and what is not, and what makes something art as opposed to imitation.

But sometimes for a lifelong Christian, this can feel more like old news than good news. Occasionally, it even feels like bad news when I’m overwhelmed with questions.

I have spent my whole life as a writer trying to string together these kinds of moments. Moments when the veil has been slit open, when I have been able to catch a glimpse of how God has held my life together.