It's true - the birds really do come closer here

"I… Can’t… Drive..."

In 1990 I drove a minibus around a field on a farm.

In 1992, whilst at Spring Harvest in Pwllheli, I had a couple of spoken driving lessons with friend Graham Pope, who was learning to become an instructor.

In 1993 I got my provisional licence.

In 2004 I was driving a quad-bike and a Pajero around another farm field again, this time down under in Matamata.

Then I hired a proper instructor, who after 3 lessons gave up on me and foisted me off onto someone else.

Instructor 5 turned out to be a bit short-tempered, but I stuck with him for as long as I could, not wishing to give up on him. His negativity and discouragement (not to mention his temperamental car) really didn’t work for me though.

On 4th July I passed the new UK theory test, including the newer hazard awareness simulation, just in time to leave the country for New Zealand again.

A few weeks later, the AA in Auckland refused to recognise any of my UK documentation and forced me to sit the theory test all over again, which again I passed.

I then had a few sets of lessons with another new instructor. These seemed to go well, partly I think because he was a bit better at instilling confidence. I enjoyed getting used to driving home down Queen Street.

Also drove Jamie’s car down a private drive in the coromandel too.

Moving to Big Manly with Jack from church was a big mistake though. He wanted me to do some really simple driving for him. I told him that I couldn’t drive, but he insisted that it would be on private property, and only involve going forwards and backwards. Neither of these things turned out to be true. He also said that he would teach me. Major temper. Reversed into the side of someone’s 4x4. So much for those lessons.

Shane gave me two lessons in Greenlane.

Tonight I got talking to Jacob after church, and wound-up driving his car, containing both him and Associate Pastor Melissa, (who doesn’t drive either) back to my place afterwards. This was an important moment. I was, for the first time, driving somewhere with a purpose. You see I was actually going home anyway.

More than anything that had happened previously, this put me on a bit of a high regarding driving. I’m still terrified of being in traffic, probably due to a mixture of my timid nature and having been run-over at 16, but I guess I’ll have to overcome those somehow.

Even though next week, on July 4th, my 2-year UK theory certificate expires again.

The Brothers Grimm

This may shock you, but once in a while a movie comes along that I actually ENJOY.


Not merely because it features an actor I like (in this case Jonathan Pryce – always a pleasure) (except for in The Curse Of The Fatal Death) but because the director has clearly put a lot of thought and effort into what he’s doing. This is just such a film. The complex design inferred that there was a really big brain behind this whole nineteenth-century world. My initial scorn at the generic love-story plotline was swallowed along with my pride when things developed in another direction entirely. And then at the end I learnt who this director was:

Terry Gilliam.

That’s Terry “One Of My Favourite Directors” Gilliam.

It was so good to know that I hadn’t imagined him.

Ooh. Betty...

A Bun's Life

Whilst walking up the Great South Road yesterday, I came upon a discarded carrier bag in the gutter. Inside, carefully wrapped in kitchen foil, were two pristine baguettes, with filling. So I ate them for lunch yesterday and today, and they were absolutely lovely. :)

I Want My Money

I might never get the chance again.

I was in Glen Innes, on Saturday June 3rd, looking up at that big round hill that they have there, with every intention of scaling it.

People tend to climb mountains “because they’re there”, and my reasoning was no different, other than that if I didn’t climb it now, I wouldn’t get another chance before potentially returning back to the UK forever next week.

I’d just attended the second half of Winkie Pratney's conference In, Against, And For The World at Hillside Community Church (with organiser Shane and old friend Jamie) and had made a parched bee-line through the hot sun here afterwards. People climb mountains in the Bible to have a word with God about something, and my oft-recurring decision of whether my life in New Zealand had run out of gas was rearing its ugly metaphor yet again.

I’d just finished a stretch volunteering for Shane’s Christian podcasting site, which he was now moving with to Texas.

I had no paid work at present either.

So I was almost out of both money, and reasons to stay.

My plane was leaving for the UK in a few days’ time. As I kept on reminding myself, just because God has used me here for the last 2 years, doesn't automatically mean that he wants to continue using me here in the future.

Anyway, I could see no way up the hill, not on foot anyway, so I headed back to town…


… and despite the above train derailment sign, caught one back to Panmure, if nothing else because it was a bit cheaper.



The following Wednesday 7th, with no change to my situation, and despite the continued absence of many pictures of the Queen in my wallet, I stared-down the odds and moved my flight back another 3 months anyway. That pesky faith in God thing. I also had a sneaking suspicion that Phil – my boss at the Christian Broadcasting Association (CBA) – would phone with further work.

Thursday 8th – no call.

Friday 9th – no call.

Saturday 10th – no call.

I decided that scrimping would demonstrate a lack of faith in God to provide, but that overspending would be just plain stupid. So I decided to simply carry on spending as per normal. Not fearfully or foolishly – just normally. God was in control, I reasoned.

At the supermarket, 500g bags of Skippy’s corn flakes and 12-packs of toilet-rolls were on special offer. Normally I would buy these cheaply now, and store them for later.

So into my basket they went.

At the checkout, I got chatting to the cashier, and genuinely accidentally let slip that I had very little cash left, (even today, I have no idea how to fake such a revelation) and was immediately not charged for the corn flakes and toilet rolls.

So I went home and put them into storage for a future that I had no way of getting to.

Five days later – on Thursday 15th - I had exactly $28.95 cash left in my wallet. There was a little bit more in my ANZ account, but since it was less than $20, there was no way that I could withdraw it from an ATM machine, while a teller would have incurred a charge. I also still had a few little 10-year-old American and Canadian travellers-cheques, but they and the odd English note really were my last reserve in NZ. So - $28.95 then. Better spend that wisely.

As it turned out, $28.95 was the exact same amount that it would cost me to get my camera film developed. I wanted the pictures to put on this blog. Hmm – not exactly a life-or-death situation. I no longer really believe that God is even in my blogging any more – that season seems to have passed. Anyway, I spent it.

Yes, you read that right – I spent my final cent on this blog.

The following day – Friday 16th - Phil from CBA suddenly rang offering me a few weeks work starting 3 days later (today).

So - the zillion dollar question: (or the $28.95 question at least)

Did God want me to stay on in New Zealand to do the job at CBA (and everything else that will happen from this point onwards), or did he provide the job because I had chosen to stay?

Or… does God simply enjoy working together with us?

It's Digital Dave

Tonight's Prime News featured a report on today's announcement by the government that from next year digital TV will be coming in, and people will have to buy set-top boxes, until the old analogue transmitters are turned off in 6 years' time. Cue lots of stock footage of TV workers in front of walls of TV screens, you know the sort of thing.

Having been through all this propaganda a few years ago in the UK, it was like watching a repeat news item. They even strung us the same line about it being the biggest advance since colour. (Enjoy your repeatedly freezing picture everyone :))

Then flatmate Dave walked in and I told him about it, to which he, being an employee of major TV network, rewound the My Sky box (NZ's Tivo equivalent) and watched the whole item again, which really was a repeat news item.

Then he suddenly squawks, rewinds again, and pauses it on one of the TV workers in front of the wall of TV screens.

"It's...me..." he gasps.

Doctor Who: The Idiot's Lantern

Easily the best episode since The Unquiet Dead. Even Maureen Lipman was cast quite well. Rose was written a whole heap better than usual, and finally had a rapport with the Doctor that worked.

The mystery of the modern Doctors’ knowledge of pop-culture is further stirred – or possibly explained – when he produces a Betamax VCR from inside the TARDIS.


The men in black angle threatened to be an intrusion by Torchwood, but turned out to be exactly the opposite. In The Christmas Invasion we were told that Torchwood is so secret that even the Prime-Minister isn’t supposed to know of their existence. That’s pretty secret. So trying to fit in lines about it every week, in this case spoken by a lowly cop, is just folly. These forced throwaway lines tangled disastrously last season, so why not learn from that? It's like stabbing yourself twice.

Didn't get why Granma kept knocking on the floor, or why all the Wire's victims kept flexing their fingers, but that's minor. Don't know how the Doctor recovered, figured out he needed to get to Ally Pally, built that entire machine and got across to the transmitter in about the same amount of time that it took the evil TV man to drive there. Even one shot of him on the bike would have helped, as it was the shots we had implied that they'd both walked there.


Great to see the Doc heading up the street dressed up in such a silly, David Clevelandesque, outfit though, with the component in his mouth and the wires wrapped around his neck. A bit more of an individual, like he, and his show, used to be.

Was surprised that the "idiot" of the title didn’t turn out to be Mickey.

Only real problem with this story though was its similarity to a film I wrote about 15 years ago. Can’t knock that then.

A few years ago author Mark Gatiss attempted unsuccessfully to pitch his own new series of Doctor Who to the BBC. Episodes like this and his earlier tale The Unquiet Dead make me wonder just what we missed out on.

That Friday Feeling - LIVE!

Due to technical / time constraints, tonight, for the first time in about 6 months, I had to present my show on Hope City Radio… live.

Of course, this should have been no big deal – most of my first year on the station had been live, (not to mention nearly every show I'd done back in the UK) but after 6 months of getting to re-record all my imperfect takes to death, tonight I found that – horrors - my standards had gone up.

In the old days I’d archived the show on a cheap SKC normal position cassette – now I was taking in leads to master it digitally onto DAT.

Previously I’d just played a random selection of tracks from the station library, in a fairly rough order. Now I was keen to include some Hillsong for live worship, some Elvis for gospel, an unreleased track, a modern track, a duet, a comedy track and an instrumental track, and all sourced from CDs that I would still have access to at home, so that I could digitally restore the show afterwards.

And of course I wouldn’t accept any pauses or fluffs at all from that idiot who would be presenting and engineering the whole thing.

Then, just as I was about to go on air, something unheard of happened. Someone I knew texted me and told me they were about to listen to the show. No pressure or anything…

JINGLE: (Wal Read) “Hope City Radio – spreading the word that Jesus is alive.”

ME: (Steve Goble, live, trying to sound smooth and fluent) “It is indeed Hope City Radio, it’s myself Steve Goble with That Friday Feeling - 45 minutes of the very very BEST in contemporary and classic Christian music. On the show this week we got Hills Christian Life Centre, Sydney, Australia, and Elvis Aaron Presley, as well as a bit of Matt Redman we’re gonna fit in before the end of the programme as well, but first of all – I think it’s time for Dave Dowlen to go on…”

At this point I hit the play button on the CD player, where I had a sketch lined-up featuring Dave Dowlen getting stage-fright before going on stage to perform the whole of I Need You.

What actually came out was distorted nonsense.

It took me the entire forty-second sketch to deduce that, at some point over the last 6 months, the levels on the CD player had been reset higher, resulting in the distortion, and the balance had been, for want of a more technical term, over-balanced onto one speaker. These I duly adjusted by about the 50-second mark.

(Good job I was planning to restore the show afterwards for the repeat version.)

Later I saw my friend and inevitably found out what he’d thought of the show. He said that he’d managed to tune-into the start of the programme, but couldn’t get a good signal, so he’d turned off again.

Doctor Who: Rise Of The Cybermen / The Age Of Steel

Rise Of The Cybermen:

Well, it's getting busy in The Odeon - Flatmate Dave. Tonight, after the rugby, Dave, Tim downstairs, Nicola and myself watched this while Cockney Neil and Chinese Cathy sat over to the side keeping an eye on it from where they were surfing the net in darkness.

Not a great start, almost identical in structure to the opening of last season’s awful Boom Town, concluding with Roger Lloyd Pack grating awkwardly his rather pathetic hook line "Set sail for Great Britain."

At this point, cockney Neil stopped in amazement and exclaimed in a loud voice the words on everyone's lips. You know what he said. You thought a variation on these words yourself. "Flippin' 'eck - it's Trigger!"


And, as the rest of the episode would prove, he undoubtedly was. I'm sure Pack has a whole big acting range inside of him, but unfortunately this just was not in evidence here. He played it like Trigger, he used Trigger's pronunciation, he was Trigger. No threat there then.

Hopefully next week we'll get the following exchange:

Trigger: "All right Ricky?"
Mickey: "It's MICKEY!"

I digress.

The TARDIS, with all those places it could land, in all those times, in all those universes, quite by chance, lands in present-day London near the River Thames.

It's a parallel universe. Yep, that's all the explanation we need. This really should have been set ten years in the future, like the UNIT ones were at the time. Maybe the penny had finally dropped that they don’t know how to handle contemporary stories post-The Christmas Invasion. Or maybe it was because of the popularity of Rose's dad last season. Still a downer of a reason to change universes though.

Mickey protests that in comicbooks it's easy to travel between universes, but the Doctor points out that this is real life. Has this ever been a smart thing to say in any genre? Even Top Secret! highlighted what an ill-conceived cliché it was as long ago as 1984.

In this universe, Big Ben has a square face and is surrounded by zeppelins. Remember this.

Rose and Mickey head away from the Doctor in opposite directions, Mickey voicing the choice the Doctor is about to make. Character-motivation. Finally.

From this point on, as far as I was concerned, I was watching an episode of Sliders, which was a good thing. I always thought that Sliders was Doctor Who in all but name, and had quite a low benchmark for continuity, so I was comfortable in my low expectations from this point on. Yep – they've landed in a parallel universe where their counterparts have key rolls, as usual. Hmm – where could this possibly be going?

Probably not where I would like it to go. Is there an alternative Doctor here? A reasonable question, yet they ignore it and carry on as if it makes no difference. If there IS another Doctor, where is he? If there ISN’T, then the Earth really should have been successfully invaded many times over by now, whilst the entire universe should have been destroyed a few times too...

(I’ll skip asking what happened to this universe’s Time Lords, since they still haven’t worked out what happened to ‘our’ ones yet. I know, I know, don't get logical with me…)

Rose's phone has a TV on it. Surely this advanced phone must have a camera attached. Does she take pictures of the places she travels to? Does she send them home? That phone idea is so underexplored.

In this universe, Rose's dad is still alive, tempting her to stay. Then, quite unexpectedly, they remember that Rose can’t stay without breaking her mum’s heart back home in her universe, which was such a relief. Usually these days, if a character is off-screen, then they’re just forgotten.

Rose’s parents never had any children here, so we all creased up when here ‘Rose’ turned out to be the family dog! Alas, our Rose never got to exclaim "Oh no – I'm the pet dog!" Quite wonderfully, I realise I’m rather enjoying the show this week.

Trigger picks people's brains using a sort of CGI headset that comes out of their earplugs. Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone in a group, or in front of a camera.

Meanwhile, this Earth’s vagrant extras are being rounded up like they're in a bleak 20th century science-fiction show. One tramp however is a ringer. You can tell because

a) he has a camcorder.
b) he has shaved this morning.


The President shows up. Once again this is a source of great joy for cockney Neil. "It's that guy from Rising Damp!"

Great surreal moment with everyone freezing in the street, reminiscent of that scene in episode one of The Prisoner. Absolutely everyone laughs, quite unconvincingly, at the joke.

Mickey, poor guy, winds up walking all the way from the River Thames to a street in Wales. I guess this really must be a parallel universe.

Mickey's gran is funny.

Mickey gets suddenly kidnapped by his "friends." Erm… okay.(?)


Here it turns out his counterpart is an underground resistance leader. Hmm – wonder what he'll have to do next week.

It had to happen - Phil has a bust-up with Trigger. Sadly it's not over Frances de la Tour.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight plays as the tramps are all changed into Cybermen. Wonderful direction. Suddenly the show is, like the old days, just doing its own thing without panicking about the audience leaving because it might be above them.

And then you remember that robots with whirring cutting machinery is exactly what last week’s episode was about too…


Several good lines from Mickey about kitchens.

Rose tries, unsuccessfully, to get her mum and dad back together again. Fortunately, they both survive the massacre at the end of the episode.

Three cheers for the return of the Doctor's long-standing catchphrase: "Cybermen!"

Then social relevance awkwardly returns for the final line: "Delete. Delete. Delete."

Unusually, I do not quote the above line in irony. I really enjoyed this, but as I said earlier, I need to employ the same level of non-think as with Sliders.

More than any episode so far in the modern series, this one actually felt like Doctor Who, right from the giveaway episode title. I later learnt that the great direction, the best in the series so far, was by a director from the original series - Graeme Harper. Back in the mid-80s he was responsible for The Caves Of Androzani and Revelation Of The Daleks, both of which featured exceptional location work, and some quite poor studio. Hmm – it could go either way.

Next week I'm expecting Rickey to die so that Mickey has to take his place and learn how to be a hero, Pete and Jackie to get back together again, and Jackie to discover that she's pregnant.

Oh waitaminute, I forgot, the story's about Cybermen.

The Age Of Steel:

Great recap – the opening credits actually had me feeling like I was watching Doctor Who again. At one point a Cyberman amusingly coins the term "Maximum deletion."

Terrible resolution to last week’s cliffhanger. Whatever it was the Doctor suddenly whipped-out and shot the Cybermen with, it would have come in very handy for saving people’s lives both before and after this moment. He also whips out some sort of control device while hiding behind the dustbins. And then Mrs Moore does the same thing after they’ve broken into Battersea Power Station.

Lots of talking, not much happening – I’m okay with that. I’d sooner the show could do that, than remain stuck in its quivering oh-no-its-been-30-seconds-and-nothing’s-happened-people-will-turn-over mode.

Why on Earth is Mickey wearing an identical outfit to Ricky? How embarrassing.

Jackie hides behind a door, and is surely seen by a Cyberman. Several minutes later she’s summoned by the ear-pod things, and it seems as though this summoning has saved her in the nick of time. Clumsy editing.

Mickey voluntarily leaves the Doctor and Rose to go with Rickey, but gives us no explanation why. I can make one up (he was intrigued by the hero he wanted to be), but we needed to be given some reason here.


Then, having not even looked for any joins between Mickey and Rickey up to this point, we’re suddenly walloped in the face with the worst piece of split-screen I’ve ever heard. Yep, heard. Just because you can’t see a line between the two Mickeys, doesn’t mean they can both talk out loud to themselves as if the other isn’t there. Ow.

After being dumped in School Reunion, The Five Doctors is back in memory again, if not in continuity, with the Doctor’s line “We’ll attack on three sides – above, between, below.”

The Cybermen each have an emotion inhibitor, ha ha ha. Diet-Cybermen.

The inside of the Cybermen’s lair looks a lot like a Borg cube.

There’s no screaming as people are assimilated this week. Whoops, did I say assimilated?

Jackie’s dead, or is she? We only have this Cyberman’s highly improbable word.

Lumic’s dead, or is he? Again, we’re taking these plot-points on faith that the bad guys aren’t lying.

Lumic, after being turned into a Cyberman, retains his own voice. And a chair.

Great argument between the Doctor and Lumic.

Not sure how Mickey texted the deactivation number to Rose. He takes Rose’s phone at the end of the episode, implying that he, quite unusually for a techie, doesn’t have his own.

The emotion inhibitors are deactivated, so the Cybermen all go mad and just die. None of them take any longer than that. We actually see one of them with their head exploding, leaving their stumpy neck behind.

Rose: In her first episode we were told she was a gymnast. In The Empty Child she climbed a rope hanging from zeppelin. This week she has tremendous difficulty with a rope ladder.

Remember the zeppelins surrounding the square-faced Big Ben? Well, once actors are in front of it, they’re all gone, and Big Ben’s face is round again.

Mickey, having become one of this series' rare good elements, is written out. Worse, his reason – to look after his gran – is left unchallenged by the Doctor, who’s just spent two episodes drilling into Rose that this universe’s Pete is not ‘her’ dad. Even worse, Mickey then forgets his gran to head off overseas.

It’s also worth noting that part of the show’s central concept then gets broken with the revelation that the TARDIS can’t ever return. The TARDIS can go anywhere at any time. That’s been the appeal for over 40 years. No planet in the entire history of the show has ever boasted so much as an “anti-TARDIS forcefield,” not even Gallifrey. And it’s travelled between universes before. A bit of a shame, but also daring.

Jackie and Pete don’t get together at the end, and neither does Rose take Pete home. In fact, Rose loses her surrogate mum, upsets her dad, and loses Mickey. Good call.

Finally, when Rose returns home to her own universe, Jackie asks her “Where’s Mickey?” as though she somehow knows that he’d left in the TARDIS with them. I guess she assumed that when he disappeared suddenly. Or maybe they phoned. Gosh I’m working hard this week.


These are fairly negative points, but I really enjoyed this. The scene with the Cyberwoman who had been preparing for her marriage was good, but not as good as the one we later saw looking at its reflection. This reminded me of the completely unrelated Elliot Gould movie Who? Missed potential here.

Overall, I think this has been my second favourite story of the modern series, after The Unquiet Dead. It suffers from its similarities to the previous story (robot/human hybrids with whirring cutting machinery), and having their loud clanging feet sneaking up on people, but it’s biggest non-threat would be that these simply aren’t ‘real’ Cybermen. They’re only part-human, part-human technology. Do you consider the computer that you’re reading this on to be very cleverly designed?

Mind you, at least they’re not allergic to gold, radiation, nail-varnish remover, and pieces of wood.

The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe

So, has there ever been an adaptation of the Narnia books that actually started off at the beginning with The Magician’s Nephew, and then carried on through the whole lot chronologically?


Tonight, flatmates Dave and Cathy sat down with myself to watch last year’s kiwi-shot (not that you’d know it) movie The Chronicles Of Narnia, and once again they’ve just begun with The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, perhaps because it was the first written, but probably because it’s the best known.

As a movie it was passable, a bit going through the motions, but certainly one that held my attention throughout.

I can't help wishing that they’d sat down beforehand and planned out how to shoot and release the whole series though. There are good lessons to be learned from the success of Lord Of The Rings.

(available here)
(review of Prince Caspian here)
(review of The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader here)

Sapphire & Steel: Look-In Adventure One

Sapphire & Steel was a 1979 British kids' TV show about two mysterious time-agents battling the paranormal.

Unfortunately for the nation's children, (including me) it was also just about the most petrifying show in television history.

ITV bosses quickly back-pedalled and rescheduled the show for a much later slot during adult programming, and subsequent series were no less disquieting. Well, not to a nine-year-old like me anyway. I had deeply disturbing nightmares until... well, maybe I still get them. Brr.

But the popular weekly kids' magazine Look-In wasn't bothered. For 76 issues across two years, they published a two-page comic-strip based on the show.

And the first of these – called Adventure One these days – did a fine job of retaining the original show's disturbing tone.


The eponymous Sapphire and Steel investigate the deranged images the boy's father has felt compelled to paint of him and other subjects since moving into his creepy new house. It emerges that a malevolent force from the ancient property has settled in the man's mind, which mutates his body into a monster, leaving the man's soul with only the reflection of his normal body to inhabit.


Look at that guy – he's terrified! You can see what an excellent job the comic's artists did on this strip, free as they were from the constraints of an ATV budget.

Thanks also to legendary comic-author Angus P Allan, the strip's uneasy tone had very effectively made the jump across media. However as you can see above, it's also at about this point in the narrative that the transition from serious TV drama to kids' comic-strip begins to become more obvious, with the villain explaining his plans out loud to himself. Something you would never have got on the TV show.

In fact before long, the comic-medium's conventions get so embraced that you have to conversely wonder how such a script could ever be filmed for TV.


It's a great story that delivers on all levels. It doesn't break any of the TV show's rules, and it's a fine comic-strip too. I have to admit that I feel a bit like watching the TV series again.

But then, y'know, it did take me 25 years to get over it the first time...

Everything Belongs: The Gift Of Contemplative Prayer by Richard Rohr

I’m not much of a reader.

For example, back in September 2003 I picked-up a copy of Richard Rohr’s book Everything Belongs: The Gift Of Contemplative Prayer, but only got around to actually reading it in this past month.

[page 53] The contemplative secret is to learn to live in the now. The now is not as empty as it might appear to be or that we fear it may be. Try to realize that that everything is right here, right now. When we’re doing life right, it means nothing more than it is right now, because God is in this moment in a nonblaming way. When we are able to experience that, taste it and enjoy it, we don’t need to hold on to it. The next moment will have its own taste and enjoyment.

I’d bought it simply because I’d flicked through it in the Wesley Owen bookshop in Kingston and found something that spoke clearly to me.

Today, I’ve no idea what that bit was.

As I’ve gone through though, I have marked a large number of passages that spoke to me today, notably stuff about liminal space.

[page 126] Our awareness of the supportive presence of God is outside of and beyond our power to express in word or conceive in thought.

Rather than review the book (which in its procontemplative-stance broadly balances the proactive-stance of my previous read Who Stands Fast?) I thought I’d just quote some of the bits that I liked...


[page 124] We all want to be with people around whom we feel safe and forgiven just by being next to them. You know they’ll receive you. You know you can show your darkest part to them. Some people have the gift in their very person to tell you, “It’s okay.”

[page 46] People the most obedient to commandment and church formulas can very often be the hardest to convert. They’ve taken the symbol for the substance. They’ve taken the ritual for the reality. They’ve taken the means for the end and become inoculated from the experience of the real thing. That’s called idolatry when we worship and protect the means. It actually keeps you from the journey to the end. Religions are only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

[page 99] In general, law gives helpful information, but it cannot give spiritual strength or transformation.

[page 103] We grow by subtraction much more than by addition.

[page 110] Too often people think it is necessary that we all see God in the same way (which is impossible anyway), but what is really necessary is that we all follow God according to what God tells us.

[page 113] More interestingly, we Catholics are always canonizing saints, pronouncing them to be in heaven for sure. They are our role models; we can imitate them. But in the entire history of the church, it has never been declared that a single person is in hell. Even Judas. The church has never said, “This person is definitely in hell.” We almost hold out for universal restoration: that the true meaning of the raising of Jesus is that God will turn all our human crucifixions into resurrection.

Available here.