STUDY TO BE QUIET

By: Michael Paternoster

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

FAIRACRES PUBLICATIONS 059

This is first and foremost a book about prayer. Paternoster argues that because most of us are caught up in an increasingly complex and artificial society we need more than ever to have at least occasional contact with elemental realities... How hard it is to be simple. How hard it is to strive to be quiet. Paternoster tells us that no form of prayer is ever easy – and at present it is probably more difficult than at any other time – but there are easier examples than the saints and the great ascetics of the past. Paternoster takes two more recent examples of people who seemed to achieve silence without being obvious spiritual masters: the author Flora Thompson and the painter John Constable, both of whom were able to see, store and express the beauty around them from a place of calm and quiet. The value of a sanctuary of inner quiet is increasingly necessary to anyone, but at that core there must be not an emptiness, but God. If we persist in trying, if we study to be quiet and listen for God in that silence, we will be rewarded.