I've been reading this book with a friend lately. The quote struck me as I read it about 3 weeks ago and just kept rolling around me all weekend

"...we would go to church and receive, it might be, a true blessing of consolation from some passage of scripture, from one of the good old hymns, or from being together. And we would hear also a sermon in which {the pastor} would struggle again with his terrible duty and need to bring comfort to the comfortless, to say something in public that could answer the private fear and grief that were all around him, and he would mostly fail. We would shake his hand at the door as we went out, trying, I suppose,  to console him for his wish to help what could only be endured..."

~Wendell Berry

 from Hannah Coulter