It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but great are those who in the midst of the crowd keep with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
SILENCE was the first prayer I learned to trust when I began my visits to San Damiano. Only later did I begin to let the words in. The silence of the chapel at prayer was broken only by a habit of praise that I came to see was so primal it was not only human. It was — or it mimicked exactly — the essential utterance of existence. It rose from the raw passion which rules life, an urge which has no voice but craves articulation. This communal prayer voiced a harmony otherwise elusive in all of creation, yet thrumming in the monastic silence.