The Fredösphere

It might be supposed that a little boy, keyed to action and charged with animal spirits, on a hard bench, with feet unsupported, would have hated this silence and would have longed for a chance to hit the boy in the next seat over the head.  But that was not the case.  Sooner or later the boy would get hit no doubt when the proper time came for it.  Bu the silence came over us as a kind of spell.  It had a life of its own.  There was something "numinous" about it, which means, in simpler non-Latin words, a sense of divine presence, which even a boy could feel.  It was almost never explained to us.  There was very little said about it.  No theories were expounded.  No arguments were promulgated.  We "found" ourselves in the midst of a unique laboratory experiment which worked.  A boy responds to reality the moment he feels it, almost quicker than an adult does.  He has not yet traveled so far inland from "the immortal sea that brought him hither," and he hasn't yet been "debauched" by commonplace words and phrases and the dull mechanics of life.  Anyway that experiment with silence in the far-off period of my youth, sitting in the hush with the moveless group, concentrated on the expectation of divine presence, did something to me and for me which has remained an unlost possession.

I had got over the sky-idea very early in life and thought of God as a Presence in the midst with whom I could commune without any ladder.  He came to our meeting with us, and we did not need to go somewhere else to find Him.  I cannot remember when I first discovered that there was a meeting place within, where Spirit met with spirit and where the Above and the below belonged together.  I knew it certainly as early as I knew that the water in our lake was buoyant and held up the young swimmer instead of drowning him.  The two things came together.  I learned to swim and to enjoy silent worship at about the same time.