“Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.”

“We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path.”

“We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us—anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.”

“All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”

“There is nothing that happens to us, not a thing we see or hear or touch that God cannot use to show us more of himself. Our lives are a daily journey in his company...”

“Touch speaks to us on levels, so much deeper than the intellect can comprehend, going to the root of us, to levels of comprehension we can't ignore.”