Spent yesterday with two dear girlfriends, both of whom became moms in the last few months. What do new moms want to do while the dads are watching the kids? Go to a movie, and browse a bookstore. I suppose we missed the boat by neglecting to schedule a spa appointment, but an hour and a half in a bookstore fit the bill.

Actually, who knows how long we were there? That's the point. It was a languid, clock-less time, spent thumbing through magazines, settling into the comfy chairs for a browse, tracking one another down to read aloud something touching or outrageous. We churchy folk have a word for this kind of experience--it is kairos, which is Greek for "time outside of time." Holy time. God's time. It feels shorter than you expect, because you are lost in the moment and the minutes fly by. It feels longer than you expect, because the time is saturated with more than seems possible.

I walked around with about six different books at different times. Empty-calorie fiction, how-to's for writers, chipper self-help, pop sociology, women's studies, I'd put one book back and pick up another, and I realized once again, bookstores do not really sell books. They do not sell information or ideas. Bookstores sell hope.

Is it blasphemy to say that I stand at the entrance of a bookstore with some of the same emotions I feel in the foyer of a church? Here will the answers be. I pick up a work of fiction as an act of faith that the story will reflect something real of the human story. I peruse the art books because I saw the photos from Beslan and I long for something true and timeless and beautiful. I crave poetry because after two political conventions, everyone's clamoring for custody of all the good words, a process which leaves the poor little dears orphaned and used.

I carry the books around, and more often than not, I carry them home with me, and they join the scores of other books begging to be read. But this time, it was enough to wander through the aisles with them, then to tuck them back onto their shelves and leave without buying anything. This is the beauty of kairos time in the bookstore. If I spend the right amount of time wandering and browsing, I can leave feeling satisfied that what I already have and feel and know is enough. Leave too hastily, and I impulsively take too much away with me, more than I can possibly carry, and I deceive myself into thinking that a book contains the key to everything.

So, I left empty-handed. But maybe during the process of cradling them around the store, something of each book seeped into me, because in some small way I felt better, in some small way I was able to receive what they had to offer, but also realize that the book of Renaissance paintings will not erase the images from Beslan, and Marianne Moore is powerless over an election. I already have words enough, it's profound silence I'm really looking for.