2023-11-19 - “We all have within us a centre of stillness surrounded by silence,” reflected Dag Hammarskjöld on the dedication of the Meditation Room at the headquarters of the United Nations. He believed that, in the place where the nations of the world gathered to debate the great issues of the day, there should be “one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense.” We need such spaces in our individual lives, too, where we can attain inner calm through what Harriet Beecher Stowe called “the grace of silence.”