The following reflection was written in September 2014, following moving back to my home community in Georgia, USA, where I had not lived since age 18. I had left in 1979 for college. I returned jobless, after being a Christian pastor and, then, chaplain in a jail - the two covering 14 years - in Florida. I moved into an old, abandoned tobacco barn about one mile from the house I was raised in and down a hill from the church building I was raised spiritually in, accepted Jesus into my "heart" in, and felt a sacred calling to Christian ministry as a clergyperson in, as an adolescent of age 15. Here, I sat with barn door open onto the slanting hillside. I could see where Uncle Rufus' store once was across the road, when I was a little boy and enjoyed riding my bike there to get a soda and candy bar. I was uncertain of an uncertain tomorrow, but a hermitage - I had dreamed of having a little hermitage for many years. The rustic barn was ideal for the life of a vowed religious contemplative, a byway on the way to somewhere and by a way I did not and could not know. I sat alone in Aloneness...

I sit in the barn this morning. Here, in the Hermitage of Peace, door is open to the outside world of bird and birdsong, moving clouds, and floating, multicolored butterflies - all enfolded in beauty and quiet. Alone I sit, where once hung and cooked tobacco, as far back as when my dad, age 80, was a young boy - for he hung tobacco where I now sit as his son of age 53. I sit, moving fingers over prayer beads, eyes open and then closed, sometimes praying mentally and then speechless inwardly and outwardly. What is happening? What is being accomplished? This would look to many as useless. In a sense, this is. That is a lesson of Silence. What appears useless is finally useful, what appears profitless is profitable. Possibly, Grace, at last, must submerge us who define our lives by socially constructed ideas of useful and profitable, into this Mystery that appears without use or profit, a waste of time and energy, for us to learn what we truly need to give our lives to and for. Prayerfulness is countercultural, exactly for it will not fit inside the bounds of what is esteemed worthy of giving ourselves to and for.