According to a Talmudic legend, an angel escorts the soul from its abode in heaven into the tomb and there unites it to the embryo. The angel tutors the new being in the mysteries of the world, transporting it to heaven and darkness to see the heights and depths of creation, revealing to it the ways of beauty, truth, and goodness, disclosing the potential of its future life on earth, even to the time and place of death. As the child matures within the womb, it ponders the wonders it has seen. Then, at the instant of birth, the angel touches the child on the mouth, erasing all memory of these marvelous revelations.
~ in GIFTS OF THE SPIRT by P. Zaleski and P. Kaufman
There are many different kinds of prayer. Yet all prayer has one basic purpose. We pray not to get something, but to open up a two-way street between us and God so that we (and others) may inwardly become something beautiful that we share with others.
"There is a time for silence and a time for speech." Teach me, O Holy One, the silence of humility, the silence of wisdom, the silence of love, the silence of perfection, the silence that speaks without words, the silence of faith. Teach me to silence my own heart that I may listen to the gentle movement of Thy Spirit within me and sense the depths which are of God.
BLESSINGS BE YOURS, dear friends! As we enter the Spring season, may you each pause to enter the Chapel of your heart where in silence you can commune gently, lovingly, humbly, with the Heart within your heart.
Now are come the days of brown leaves. They fall from the trees; they flutter on the ground. ... I hear them tell you of their borning days, when they did come into the world as leaves. ... Today, they were talking of the time before their borning days of the springtime. ... They told how they were a part of earth and air, before their tree-borning days. And now they are going back. They go back to the earth again. But they do not die.
~ from THE SINGING CREEK WHERE THE WILLOWS GROW by Opal Whitely
Lying alone in the pasture, dark except for the magnetic full moon. There is an overwhelming sense of quietness. My being is part of the earth and part of the pure white light of the moon at the same time. Nothing else is significant. For a second I wonder, "Am I dead?" It isn't important -- I am spending an hour in God's hands, and it will become part of me.
In that moment of awareness, I had an epiphany, that the light we encounter on the road of death is our being in the act of coming home to itself. I understood that light is our natural state, but that we human beings must help each other as we move toward the shores of light. ...Being in the light is knowing we must get others into it. ...The light is where we belong. Everyone who is not in the light is looking forward to being there. So we leave the light to go and experience the need for light and thus come back to it anew.
~ from OF WATER AND THE SPIRIT by Malidoma Patrice Some
The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. ... If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.
