"If withdrawal into silence is focus or concentrate of experience, then it is a necessary and natural need, not an artificially imposed religious duty. Silence is the environment of creativity, the essential condition for letting-be, the birthplace of love. One does not usually compose poetry on Paddington station in the rush hour, although such experience may well provide the initial inspiration for a poem. Sleep and waking, incubation and birth, winter and summer, rest and action, habitual awareness of Being and acts of penitence and praise: this is the natural order of things. Those who run from silence are the real escapists for they dare not confront reality." (from Prayer: A New Encounter, p. 167)
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:59:46 +0000