The deepest lessons come out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires.

One step at a time, over the years, as I sought to plumb the mystery of suffering (which cannot be plumbed), I began to see that there is a sense in which everything is a gift. Even my widowhood.

A grandmother's special calling is to pray and to be a fellow worker in the battle in which her children or her grandchildren are engaged.

Silence, as someone has said, is the mother of prayer and the nurse of holy thoughts. Silence cuts down on our sins, doesn't it? We can't be sinning in so many different ways if we are being quiet before God. Silence nourishes patience, charity, discretion.

Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.

The pain of loneliness is one way in which he wants to get our attention. We may be earnestly desiring to be obedient and holy. But we may be missing the fact that it is here, where we happen to be at this moment and not in another place or another time, that we may learn to love Him - here where it seems He is not at work, where He seems obscure or frightening, where He is not doing what we expected Him to do, where He is most absent. Here and nowhere else is the appointed place. If faith does not got to work here, it will not work at all.

It is when we come to the Lord in our nothingness, our powerlessness and our helplessness that He then enables us to love in a way which, without Him, would be absolutely impossible.