The Room With No Doors

In her autobiography, Teresa of Avila describes the soul's interior castle — room after room leading deeper toward the center where God dwells. Most of us live in the outer chambers, rattled by every noise from the street. We mistake the absence of conflict for peace, the way we might mistake an empty room for a quiet one.

But Jesus speaks of something different in John 14:27: "My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you." The world's peace is negotiated, conditional, always one headline away from shattering. The peace Christ offers has no such fragility. It rises from a deeper aquifer altogether.

Thomas Merton once sat in a hospital waiting room in Louisville and felt the whole noisy, fluorescent-lit space become luminous with Presence. Nothing changed outwardly. The magazines were still dog-eared, the television still droning. Yet something had shifted in his awareness — he had dropped beneath the surface chaos into what the contemplative tradition calls the prayer of quiet, that still point where the soul rests in God before thought, before language, before effort.

This is the peace Christ bequeaths. Not a feeling we manufacture through positive thinking, but a Presence we discover when we stop manufacturing anything at all.

The next time anxiety tightens your chest, try this: sit still, breathe slowly, and silently repeat one word — "peace" or "Jesus" — letting it carry you below the storm. The quiet is already there, waiting. You need only descend to where Christ has always been holding you.