A story about silence...A woman who had been using the Jesus Prayer for fourteen years complained that she had never had any sense that God was there. But when she had it pointed out to her that she was talking all the time, she agreed to take her stand silently for a few days. As she was doing it she became aware that God was there, that the silence that surrounded her was not emptiness, absence of noise and agitation, but that there was a solidity to this silence, that it was not something negative, but positive, a presence, the presence of God who had made himself known to her by creating the same silence in her. And then she discovered that the prayer came up quite naturally again, but it was no longer the sort of discursive noise that had prevented God from making himself known. (Living Prayer by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom DLT 1966) I like it that God created the same silence in the woman as surrounded her... Andrew