When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.

The difference to me is not between the believers on one hand and the nonbelievers on the other hand. It's between people who carry in their hearts some sense of what the word "God," at least to me, means, which is a loving, creating, everlastingly renewing presence deeply concerned with the well-being of the earth and all its creatures.

In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.

Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.

...words are not only meaning but music and magic and power.

if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.

At least to look back over their own lives, as I have looked back over mine, for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easy to miss when you're caught up in the process of living them. If God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the Bible and the church, then I think he speaks to us largely through what happens to us, so listen to what has happened to you-for the sound, above all else, of his voice.