Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.

It is precisely because we cannot see God that we can only know that our prayer is valid by the effect it has upon our lives, by the way we treat our neighbor.

More than anything I have learned that we are all frail people, vulnerable and wounded; it is just that some of us are more clever at concealing it than others! And of course the great joke is that it is O.K. to be frail and wounded because that is the way the almighty transcendent God made people.

Prayer, even more than eating or sleeping, is not a luxury but a necessity, and we are only fully human when we remember this and arrange our life accordingly.

The tension between the call to the desert and to the market place arises not from the greater presence of God in one or the other but from our varying psychological needs to apprehend him in different ways.

We only deliberately waste time with those we love -- it is the purest sign that we love someone if we choose to spend time idly in their presence when we could be doing something more 'constructive.

The world is not divided into the strong who care and the weak who are cared for. We must each in turn care and be cared for, not just because it is good for us, but because it is the way things are.