Praying brings Therese into communion with her mother, her father and her sisters. For part of her experience in prayer is condltíoned by the presence of beloved persons: the presence of human love is a sort of token for the hidden presence of God. How otherwise can a child be trained in prayer, in realizing the hidden presence, except by the sacrament of visible, tangible love? Therese is taken into their prayer and nestles there.
Once I enter wilderness, I am more honest with myself. The lure is less what I can tally or photograph than what I can sense: the quiet, intangible qualities of desert, mountain and forest. Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of the wilderness have always been its spiritual values -- silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude -- able to be harvested by any traveler who visits. Prayers in the wilderness were like streams in the desert for me -- something unanticipated and unchronicled welling up, and because of that surprise, appreciated all the more. Not until I actually left the wilderness was I conscious what had been the extent of my thirst.