A certain distrust, she once wrote, pervaded early forms of Christianity when it came to the practice of silent prayer. Those who didn’t speak their prayers aloud were subject to significant social prejudice. What, after all, could they be wanting to speak to God about that they needed to keep from everybody else? Beneath this fragment, she had scribbled the words silence and lying? silence and schemes? followed by the semiunintelligible musing that If silent prayer is untrustworthy then what does that say about the God you’re praying to?
