The Well Beneath the Storm

In the monastery at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton once described a moment during night prayer when a violent thunderstorm shook the abbey walls. The windows rattled, rain hammered the roof, and lightning split the Kentucky darkness. Yet the monks continued sitting in silence, their breathing steady, their hearts anchored in the presence of God. Merton later wrote that the storm revealed something — not the absence of peace, but its true depth. Peace was not the silence above; it was the stillness below.

This is the peace Jesus offers 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 the calm surface of a lake — easily disturbed by the smallest stone. Christ's peace is the aquifer beneath the bedrock, untouched by weather, unmoved by circumstance.

Centering prayer teaches us this. When we sit in silence and a thousand thoughts arise — anxieties, plans, regrets — we do not fight them. We let them pass like clouds. We return to the sacred word. We sink beneath the noise into what the mystics called the "ground of being," where the Spirit of the Living God already dwells.

Teresa of Avila called the innermost room of the soul the place where God waits in perfect stillness. Most of us live in the outer rooms, rattled by every storm.

The invitation today is simple: go deeper. Sit with Christ in the silence. His peace is not something you manufacture. It is something you descend into.