Book excerpt: Beginning with the Psalms and adding the distilled wisdom of years of study and writing, Martin Marty offers a meditation marked by insight, strength, and a sure, sober faith. Throughout A Cry of Absence, he pursues the metaphor of the "winter of the heart." Marty bases his concept of the wintry way to God on a passage from the theologian Karl Rahner, describing a "wintry sort of spirituality." It refers to movement toward faith that grapples with pain, uncertainty, evil, loss, and the mystery of death to discover "hope on the winter-fallow landscape."