You believed that everything is a form of prayer, including laughter, including tears. Yes, you were a reverential man, but you weren’t stiff or boring or preachy or dour. Your essays were both concise — often just a page in length — and lush, your sentences as intricate and twisty as plants in a terrarium. You combined prose and poem (and prayer, you said) to bear witness to the miracles around us. One of your twenty books consisted entirely of prayers in which you praise (or try to praise) admirable and not-so-admirable things: loud recycling trucks; editors; cats (alas, not your favorite creature); a girl singing at a bus stop; the doctor who saved your son’s life; little brown birds; decent shoes; firemen and firewomen; wicked hot showers. Of your twenty books at least three are explicitly organized around the theme of epiphanies, that literary term with religious roots. You were firm in your Catholic faith even as you criticized the Church’s nefarious deeds and small-minded tendencies. Your stories, like those of the “skinny Jewish guy who wandered around Judea some centuries ago,” spoke of courage and humility and grace. Yet one need only a heart — no religious beliefs at all — to be stirred by your insistence that “we are called to compassion, and not to judgment.”