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There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden, or even your bathtub.
*Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. In Lama Surya Das. Awakening to the Sacred.
Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?
*Thomas Merton. In Thomas Merton: Essential Writings. Edited by Christine M. Bochen.
*True silence is rest to the mind, and it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body; nourishment and refreshment.
*William Penn. "Silence and Transcendent Presence." At www.findarticles.com .
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6Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time, 7 casting all your care [anxiety, worry] upon Him, because He cares about you.
*1 Peter 5.6-8
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In a sermon "Finding God in a Busy World," John Killinger ends his message on prayer and solitude with the following story:
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"I was in Brooklyn Heights some months ago to visit the church where one of the greatest Congregationalist ministers had once preached, the great Henry Ward Beecher. In the evening, I walked with one of my hosts along the promenade that overlooks Manhattan. ... She talked about her life when she had arrived there several years before. Her husband had left her, and she was having difficulties with her only child, a daughter. She had come to this place at night thinking she could not go on. She hadn't wanted to take her life, but she didn't know how she could go on in the pain and the agony she was feeling.
"She said she sat on one of the benches and looked across the bay at the city. She stared out at Liberty Island in the distance, and she watched the tugboats as they moved in and out of the bay. She sat, and she sat. The longer she sat, she said, the more her life seemed to be invested with a kind of quietness that came over her like a spirit.
"Down deep she began to feel peaceful again. She said she felt somehow that God was very near to her, as if she could almost reach out and touch God. Better yet, she didn't need to reach out. God was touching her. She felt whole and complete and healed as she sat there that evening. It became a turning point in her life.
"'Since then,' she said, 'whenever I feel under pressure at my job or from any personal problems, I come down here and sit on this very bench. I'm quiet; I feel it all over again, and everything is all right.'
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