"You are precious in my eyes, and beautiful, and I love you" (Is 43:4).In these words I touch upon the central theme of all that follows. What I have tried to express, from many different angles and in contact with many different struggles, desires, and sorrows of the human heart, is the encounter with God's loving and healing gaze. Indeed, the deepest desire of each one of us, which lies at the root of every other desire, is the thirst for intimacy. It is this thirst to which I have tried to speak in these poems.We bear deep within us an insatiable yearning to be seen, known, and loved as we really are--and in being seen in this way, also to be held, to be gently and lovingly cradled in the arms of another.In the poems that follow, I bring to expression in prayer my own journey deeper into the perfect loving gaze and the most tender embrace of God, and also my experience of seeing, receiving, and holding others from within this place of his own Love.My hope is that in my words you may find points of access, touches of gentle love, which awaken in you the desire and the confidence to open your heart vulnerably to God, so that, gazing upon him in faith, you may experience his loving gaze upon you, and may feel the sheltering embrace of his Love from which nothing, nothing can separate you.+ + +The poetry contained in this book has been gathered from my other published works and "bound together" here in a single place. The collection is unabridged (I have only removed "repeats," when a poem appears in multiple places), and the poems are given mostly in the order in which they were written. Therefore, this collection shows with spontaneity the development and deepening of my thought and prayer over the last few years; and indeed it bears in itself the flowering of the many seeds of grace which were planted in the soil of my heart and my life before the writing of all that is contained here.My prayer is that you may experience his tender gaze while you read and reflect upon my words--that in some small way they may help you to encounter the immensity of God's love for you. This is a love that is unique, unrepeatable, and unspeakably close, a love through which he yearns ardently to enfold you in his embrace and to unite you to himself in an intimacy that surpasses all hope and imagination, and which endures throughout life until it finds its consummation in eternity.