2:19

"I was kept in solitary confinement in this cell for the next two years. I had nothing to read and no writing materials; I had only my thoughts for company, and I was not a meditative man, but a soul that had rarely known quiet. I had God. But had I really lived to serve God--or was it simply my profession?
People expect pastors to be models of wisdom, purity, love, truthfulness; they cannot always be genuinely so, because they are also men: so, in smaller or greater measure, they begin to act the part. As time passes, they can hardly tell how much of their behavior is play-acting.

I remembered the deep commentary which Savonarola wrote on the fifty-first Psalm, in prison, with his bones so broken that he could sign the self-accusatory paper only with his left hand. He said there were two kinds of Christian: those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe.
You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments. If a man, planning to rob a rich man's home, sees a stranger who might be a police-man, he holds back. If, on second thoughts, he breaks in after all, this proves that he does not believe the man to be an agent of the law. Our beliefs are proved by what we do.

Did I believe in God? Now the test had come. I was alone. There was no salary to earn, no golden opinions to consider. God offered me only suffering--would I continue to love Him?

My mind went back to one of my favorite books, The Pateric, concerning certain fourth-century saints who formed desert monasteries when the Church was persecuted. It has 400 hundred pages, but the first time I picked it up I did not eat, drink or sleep until I had finished it. Christian books are like good wine--the older the better. It contained the following passage:

A brother asked his elder, "Father, what is silence?" The answer was, "My son, silence is to sit alone in your cell in wisdom and fear of God, shielding the heart from the burning arrows of thought. Silence like this brings to birth the good. O silence without care, ladder to heaven! O silence in which one cares only for first things, and speaks only with Jesus Christ! He who keeps silent is the one who sings, 'My heart is ready to praise Thee, O Lord!'"

I wondered how you could praise God by a life of silence. At first, I prayed greatly to be released. I asked, "You have said in scripture that it is not good that a man should be alone; why do You keep me alone?" But as the days passed into weeks my only visitor was still the guard, who brought wedges of black bread and watery soup, and never spoke a word.
His arrival reminded me daily of the saying, "The gods walk in soft shoes": in other words, the Greeks believed that we cannot be aware of the approach of a divinity. Perhaps in this silence I was coming closer to God. Perhaps, too, it would make me a better pastor; for I had noticed that the best preachers were men who possessed an inner silence, like Jesus.
When the mouth is too much open, even to speak good, the soul loses its fire just as a room loses warmth through an open door.
Slowly, I learned that on the tree of silence hangs the fruit of peace. I began to realize my real personality, and made sure that it belonged to Christ. I found that even here my thoughts and feelings turned to God and that I could pass night after night in prayer, spiritual exercise and praise. I knew now that I was not play-acting, believing that I believed.

[somewhere after 1948 arrest, published In God's Underground 1968.
--Richard Wurmbrand]