BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD

Silence is as common as the air we breathe. It is a vast pool always available to us where we can refresh and renew ourselves, or simply stop in for a while. Silence is God's gift to our minds, a gift that modern life seems to have lost or crowded out. We need more silence in our lives, more stillness in our homes. We need, in our increasingly complex and frenetic world, to silence ourselves -- and to listen… The key ingredient is not so much the total absence of noise as receptivity and access to the "still small voice within".
The cultivated ability to hear that voice is the most enduring value of silence. In silence we can discover the divine within, which is universally accessible but speaks to each of us in a unique voice. If we can locate, at the very center of silence, our individual "still small voice," we will have found our greatest ally in life. Because if we listen to that voice with an open heart, it will guide us through the most challenging crossroads of our lives: in work, in love, in distinguishing right from wrong.

We need only trust the voice that speaks to us out of the silence.

-- Robert Lawrence Smith in A Quaker Book of Wisdom


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