I know such faith only at second or third hand: that's to say, I have just enough faith to believe it exists. To imagine it. And to feel a kind of pity for people who can't imagine it at all, who don't believe it exists, who diminish its possibility in their minds by calling it self-delusion or superstition. Belief is something else. I can say the creed without perjury. But faith.... When my mother tried a few times to tell me about the faith she did indeed possess, she sought the right words in vain, although she was an articulate woman; and if she conveyed something of her experience to me so convincingly, it was more by her tone of voice than by the words she found.

-Denise Levertov, "Work that Enfaiths" (1990)