Life is not lived on a continuum. We do not find wisdom or God on a laser beam,
bright and cold and straight. We have times of great dark incubation. We go
through periods when life feels more like death than like gestation. But it is
always gestating. It may even be in the dark times that we grow the most. Isn’t
God always the growing season in us? Isn’t everything that happens in life simply
seeding something to come—and isn’t all of it God, revealing wisdom? There is a
wisdom in natural rhythm but we long ago abandoned it to technology and
electricity. We have become human hamsters on a 24-hour wheel. We work and
run and talk at all times. The dark never overtakes us. The silence of the day never
sets in. And we wonder why we can’t find God. We are never still enough
anymore to listen to the voice within that will tell us how.

The words of Joan Chittister.