A Sunlit Absence, by Martin Laird
It is not easy to do more than pay lip service to the scriptural call "Be still and know that I am God." As anyone who has tried with any regularity soon discovers, becoming still before God is not easy. It is said that Teresa of Ávila once shook her hourglass in frustration because her time of prayer was passing at a snail's pace. More recently Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that his practice of contemplative prayer sometimes feels like an exercise in "twiddling my thumbs" and "shifting from buttock to buttock."