But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares?

I'm a hopeless prayer. I think somewhere in there I spend a great deal of time at it.

The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.

I pray for people I love when they are sick. I pray that way.

And there are other dangers potentially more dangerous than even nuclear war. There is AIDS. There is terrorism. There are drugs and more to the point the darkness of our time that makes people seek escape in drugs. There is the slow poisoning of what we call "the environment" of all things as if with that absurdly antiseptic phrase we can conceal from ourselves that what we are really poisoning is home, is here, is us.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.