Sunday, April 16, 2000
"SILENCES CAN BE THE GREATEST OF PRAYERS"
Editor -- Silence can also come as a form of prayer (Letters, April 7). My first hint came in two therapeutic community meetings of 30 psychiatrically disturbed sailors and Marines. They'd been evacuated from the Pacific to the Oakland Naval Hospital in the 1950s as an aftermath of the Korean War. Psychiatrist Harry Wilmer, who led the group, likened those hourlong silences to those found in a Quaker meeting. I later experienced this same kind of silence in a group I led with patients at the naval hospital in Japan, and still again it appeared with a group of 50 aggressive inmates at Chino's prison for men.
Silences are not empty gaps in “the trance of ordinary life,'' but can be moments of self-initiated orisons that both reinvigorate and restrain, keeping us on an even keel.
DENNIE BRIGGS
San Pablo .