"'Absence, Absence' a poet hears the cry. Winterly frost comes in the void left when love dies or a lover grows dis-tant. The absence can also come, however, to a waste space left when the divine is distant, the sacred is remote, when God is silent. The fury and the bleakness within the soul can remain, no matter what the season or the weather.

"My visit to the wintering heart, this book-length pil-grimage into and through a season that never wholly disappears, devotes itself entirely to a wintry sort of spiri-tuality This sort, in the end, seeks a security that is at-tached through fidelity to the secure source, the Presence, the Thou. The Lord is close to those whose courage is broken and he saves those whose spirit is crushed' (Psalm 34:38) In the end, despite the psalms' riddles and hard ques-tions, trust can grow along with hope There on the horizon next to the horizon of those who have seen God excluded remain people in whom the mystery of faith grows.

"Different winterers will have varying paces of change till they come to awareness of their Yes. Some will be surprised on the snowscape in the midst of the dark of winter night, when moments of astonishing clarity offer promise. Others must scan the horizon and be content with small signs no richer than the glow of a candle in a distant cabin of refuge. Yet a wintry sort of spirituality also produces occasions when the Absence leaves the horizon and the Presence realizes itself.

"One might speak of this Presence on the horizon as being touchable in its impending nearness.. The psalmist had a word for that, too, a promise after the fallow season: 'Taste, then, and see that the Lord is good' (34:8). For those who