It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him – Lamentations 3:27-28Be still, and know that I am God – Psalm 46:10For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak., making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which came from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. – Henri Poincaré
It doesn’t matter what we strive to do, striving is
necessary – if only to prove that striving alone is insufficient. Discipline, bearing the yoke, if we carry it
through to the end, will lead us to a summit of silence.
Paul calls the Law a guardian, a nanny, a pedagogue – something formal
and pedantic to help us get started in the right way.
So it is with all the burdens we carry in life – with life
in this world itself. Our journey here,
all of it, long or short, is mostly boot camp.
Some of us will advance a little beyond and be more of a help than a
hindrance to our fellow travelers, and we will all know our joys as well as our
sorrows along the way.
At times, really,
the weariness seems too much.
For those times, God has given us the gift of silence. The space between, the stillness that holds
the rhythm. Rest.
