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" This knowledge of God progressively replaces the rabid busyness and self-importance that drives most human beings, including the religious ones. It comes to possess us no matter where we are. Now, "Whatever we do, in word or deed, we do in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col 3:17). Solitude and silence are not another job. They are not, really, something we have to think to do. They are whom we have become. We still need to cultivate solitude and silence, from time to time going alone and being quiet. But we carry them with us wherever we go.
In the contemporary context (especially the religious context) someone needs to tell us about solitude and silence just to let us know there are such things. Someone then needs to tell us it's okay to enter them. Someone needs to tell us how to do it, what will happen when we do, and how we go on from there. "
― Ruth Haley Barton , Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence
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" In her book Leaving Church, former parish priest and award-winning preacher Barbara Brown Taylor describes what it was like to feel her soul slipping away. She says: Many of the things1 that were happening inside of me seemed too shameful to talk about out loud. Laid low by what was happening at Grace-Calvary, I did not have the energy to put a positive spin on anything. . . . Beyond my luminous images of Sunday mornings I saw the committee meetings, the numbing routines, and the chronically difficult people who took up a large part of my time. Behind my heroic image of myself I saw my tiresome perfectionism, my resentment of those who did not try as hard as I did, and my huge appetite for approval. I saw the forgiving faces of my family, left behind every holiday for the last fifteen years, while I went to conduct services for other people and their families. Above all, I saw that my desire to draw as near to God as I could had backfired on me somehow. Drawn to care for hurt things, I had ended up with compassion fatigue. Drawn to a life of servanthood, I had ended up a service provider. Drawn to marry the Divine Presence, I had ended up estranged. . . . Like the bluebirds that sat on my windowsills, pecking at the reflections they saw in the glass, I could not reach the greenness for which my soul longed. For years I had believed that if I just kept at it, the glass would finally disappear. Now for the first time, I wondered if I had devoted myself to an illusion. "
― Ruth Haley Barton , Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry
