The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away
whatever may block our awareness of that which is God in us. . . .
It will be in order to suggest certain simple aids to this end.
One of these is the practice of silence, or quiet.
As a child I was accustomed to spend many hours alone in my rowboat,
fishing along the river, when there was no sound
save the lapping of the waves against the boat.
There were times when it seemed as if the earth
and the river and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse.
It was a time of watching and waiting for what I did not know—
yet I always knew.
There would come a moment when beyond the single pulse beat
there was a sense of Presence which seemed always to speak to me.
My response to the sense of Presence always had the quality of personal communion.
There was no voice. There was no image. There was no vision.
There was God.
from Disciplines of the Spirit
