One sound seldom heard on a prison yard is the sound of someone singing. Yet, unmistakably, I heard the joyful voice of my inmate friend, Ed, singing in the dormitory shower. It was positively liberating to hear him sing, totally immersed in the music.
Having no material goods, no family, and serious health problems, Ed confided that he has no reason whatsoever to be happy and sing like that. He said, "I have a happy spirit and it's just natural to sing and dance."
Nothing is more commendable than to live lyrically, to make our lives a continuous song of experience...To let go into the music, to dance, to spin and sway as the sounds resound in your bones, to feel your feet grow lighthearted as they sweep you along to the rhythm of the music, is to touch into the harmonies of the soul.
The love of God, unutterable and perfect flows into a pure soul the way that light rushes into a transparent object. The more love that it finds, the more it gives itself; so that, as we grow clear and open, the more complete the joy of loving is. And the more souls who resonate together, the greater the intensity of their love, for, mirror-like, each soul reflects the others.
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard? "
BLESSINGS OF THE SILENCE be with you, dear friends! Our deepening heart-prayers are acts of radical and continual abandonment to the Divine Guest abiding within our Inner Sacred Chapel. Here we trust with confidence — whether alone or with others, waking or sleeping, working or resting. Extended periods spent in the silence basking in Love's Presence or yearning in loneliness can open the space for the Prayer of the Heart to well up and radiate the love and light that we are at the core. May we open our hearts in the Silence each day . . . and just BE.
I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence, so we need to listen. For, it is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us that matters. Prayer feeds the soul — as blood is to the body, prayer is to the soul — and it brings us closer to God.
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever we so concentrate our attention that we completely forget our own ego and desires, we are praying.
And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. . . . I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.
