This week, some words from a recent post by Pete Greig, a church pastor in Surrey.

“Jesus is to be found in the eye of the storm. This is something I am learning. In fact, with all the distractions, deletions and distortions of this turning world, it has become my necessary daily practice simply to sit in silence and stillness each morning for a few minutes, re-centering myself on the peace of his presence, re-anchoring my scattered senses in the absolute bedrock of his love.

This is not a type of prayer I was taught as a child and at times it doesn’t even feel like praying. … But I believe that God’s quiet invitation to each one of us at the start of this year is this: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’. We know ‘of’ God through the bible but we actually know him through the practice of silence, stillness and solitude….

I believe that our world needs people who carry this deep stillness, a lack of anxiety, a reassuring quality of eternity in their hearts. Each morning in prayer I reinstate Jesus as the One whose loving actuality defines reality – not my hormones, not my bank balance, not my problems and pains. Only his presence. Without these moments of recentering I can easily spend my day like a pin-ball pinging between flashing lights, propelled from reaction to reaction by circumstance….

T.S. Eliot captures and conveys the spirit of precisely this kind of silent praying;

‘You are here to kneel, where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying’”