Prayer has become almost nonexistent. I go through the motions – that is what it feels like – just going through the motions – getting up in the morning, sitting for half to 3/4 of an hour without any feeling of personal engagement in what I am doing. I am like an automaton. In the afternoons it is not very different. All this week we have had very cold weather, sharp frosts and clear blue skies. In the afternoons I have been going for long walks but without any feeling of involvement in nature, without any of the rapport I usually feel. All this is pointed up by my reading of Thomas Merton’s journals – waxing eloquent about the beauty and silence of his hermitage in the woods of Kentucky and his intense feelings of unity with God and with nature – and reading Teilhard de Chardin’s ecstatic communion with nature as the epiphany of Christ. Meanwhile here I am with a different view – wild and beautiful, but not to be compared with the hushed solemnity of the Kentucky woods nor the vast silence of the Gobi desert. It is a learning experience, I tell myself; progress, though not the progress you imagined. There is nothing glamorous about it, nothing dramatic, nothing beautiful. It is ordinary, dull and uneventful, and, I tell myself, it is here that God must be found because it is here, in the ordinary, dull and uneventful, that so many of us live. It struck me the other day that it is exactly this that Charles de Foucauld latched on to with his desire to live the hidden life of Nazareth. And it is this that the Little Brothers and Sisters do, hidden lives among the poor of the world. All this points up a profound mystery. If only I could understand it and articulate it.