Silent Prayer
“Silent prayer simplifies the confused, complex, conflicting heap of life experiences. It makes us one again. It restores us to the creative matrix… It is not so different from a man who has wandered into the woods and lost his way. After beating all night in the heavy underbrush, he sinks down toward morning; and there from the ground he sees ahead of him an open clearing and he slowly recognizes it to be one he knows well enough; and at last he knows where he is and what he has done and what he must do next. Before he saw this opening, all had been hopelessly confused. Now it is simple and clear.
In silent prayer the many seems to give way to the one. Complexity seems to yield to simplicity… But it is no empty oneness that is accomplished there. There is a selection at work in silent prayer… As a boy I used to watch my grandmother pour out the milk into broad flat pans and set these away on the shelf of the darkened milk room. For cream rises to the top when the milk is not disturbed. Robert Barclay, a seventeenth century Quaker, sensed this as he described the power of a group assembled in silent prayer: ‘As I gave way unto it, I found the veil weakening in me and the good raised up.’”
~Douglas Steere
In silent prayer the many seems to give way to the one. Complexity seems to yield to simplicity… But it is no empty oneness that is accomplished there. There is a selection at work in silent prayer… As a boy I used to watch my grandmother pour out the milk into broad flat pans and set these away on the shelf of the darkened milk room. For cream rises to the top when the milk is not disturbed. Robert Barclay, a seventeenth century Quaker, sensed this as he described the power of a group assembled in silent prayer: ‘As I gave way unto it, I found the veil weakening in me and the good raised up.’”
~Douglas Steere
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