CMC Magazine October 1, 1995 / Page 14

BOOK EXCERPT

Searching for the Silent Places

"How might we find an answer? Only by looking within ourselves. Not at what moves in lockstep with all the external machinery of our lives, but, to begin with, at the silent places. They are like the sanctuary we find ourselves passing through for a few moments upon waking in the morning. Just before we come fully to ourselves -- recollecting who we were, bowing beneath all the necessities of the preceding days--we may feel ourselves ever so briefly on the threshold of new possibilities, remembering whispered hopes borne upon distant breezes. We know at such moments the freedom--yes, just the tiniest cracks of freedom, for Ellul was, after all, right--to awaken a different self. 'Must I fully determined by the crushing burdens of the past? Or is something new being asked of me--some slight shift in my own stance that, in the end may transform all the surrounding machinery of my existence, like the stuff of so many dreams?'

"Man is he who knows and transforms himself--and the world--from within. He is the future speaking."

This Issue /	Index /	CMC Studies Center /	Contact Us