Where did my homeward search take me? ' It took me and continues to take me every now and then to people in the thick of one kind of trouble or another who, because they know of my ordination, seek me out for whatever they think I may have in the way of comfort or healing, and I, who in the old days would have shrunk with fear from any such charged encounter, try to find something wise and hopeful to say to them, only little by little coming to understand that the most precious thing I have to give them is not whatever words I find to say, but simply whatever, spoken or unspoken, I have in me of Christ, which is also the most precious thing they have to give me. All too rarely, I regret to say, my search has taken me also to a sacred and profoundly silent place inside myself, where it is less that I pray than that, to paraphrase Saint Paul, the Holy Spirit itself, I believe, prays within me and for me "with sighs too deep for words" (Rom. 8:26).
-from Secrets in the Dark
