Once there was a great bombing, and I had my baby sister with me. I had Maria on my back and I was running back home, but I could not breathe, I could not swallow. I could not say anything. When I came home, mamika embraced me. She said, "Why are you so frightened?" That was such a balm to me. Her words still live inside me. She said, "All of us will meet anyway, even if they kill you. "There was such a strength for me in those moments. Through my mother's calm, unshakeable faith, God came to comfort me.
At a certain pitch of religious experience, the heart just wants to sing; it breaks into song. Paradoxically, you could say when silence finds its fullness, it comes to word. As the Book of Wisdom says, "When night in its swift course had reached its halfway point and deep silence embraced everything" -- when night was at its darkest and deepest -- there "the eternal Word leaped from the Heavenly throne": silence burst into song.