Love in action is the answer to every problem in our lives and in this world. Love in action is the force that helped us make it to this place, and it's the truth that will set us free.
Faith means receiving God, it means being overwhelmed by God. Faith helps us to find trust again and again when, from a human point of view, the foundations of truth have been destroyed. Faith gives us the vision to perceive what is essential and eternal. It gives us eyes to see what cannot be seen, and hands to grasp what cannot be touched, although it is present always and everywhere.
~ from WHY WE LIVE IN COMMUNITY by Eberhard Arnold
The way in which we pray, when we pray really and simply, not saying prayers composed by others unless they are truly the expression of our own faith, but with simplicity talking to God in absolute confidence and sincerity, tell what our faith is.
The word faith, freed from its burden of dogmas, implies a way of life imperceptibly chosen -- keenly instituted -- moment by moment. While it is often considered the first step on the path, it is also, as well, the last. In faith, we know that we belong, that we can never be separated from the inexhaustible well-spring from which we take our lives and our direction.
From the viewpoint of BELIEFS all doubts are disastrous. From the viewpoint of FAITH, doubt is the indispensable stimulant. To lose one's BELIEFS may not be a loss but a gain: an opportunity. "When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has gained," is an ancient Sufi saying. To lose one's FAITH, however, is catastrophic; the loss of this vital human constituent means mutilation, dehumanization, cynicism, nihilism.
~ from A LITTLE COMPENDIUM ON THAT WHICH MATTERS by Frederick Franck
Faith is the experience of divine breath... No intellectual argument can awaken faith; what it can do at best is to eliminate obstacles, prejudices and misunderstandings, and thus help establish the state of interior silence necessary for the divine breath. But faith itself is the divine breath whose origin is found neither in logical reasoning, nor in human moral action. The divine and flaming Word shines in the world of the silence of the soul and "moves" it. This movement is living faith -- therefore real and authentic -- and its light is hope or illumination.
~ Anonymous in THE FIRE OF SILENCE AND STILLNESS ed. by Paul Harris
To see every woman and every man as sister and brother is to participate in the faith vision of the mystic, whose central intuition is a graced effect of contemplation, which gradually transforms our way of seeing reality. This mystical vision is far from an esoteric or "misty" dream, for surely the survival of our planet depends on a universal realization of this unity and the interconnectedness of all peoples and of all the cosmos, in the one Love which is God.
I very much wanted to believe in God; but I could not deceive myself: I had no faith. "And suddenly there came a second, when somehow for the first time I saw (as if a door had opened from a dark room into the sunny street), and in the next second I already knew for sure that God exists... I call this moment the greatest miracle because this precise knowledge came to me not through reason but by some other way... And so by such a miracle my new spiritual life began, which helped me to endure another thirteen years of life in concentration camps and prisons."
~ Yuri Mashkov in GOD'S REVELATION OF THE HUMAN HEART by F. Seraphin Rose
May you enjoy the BLESSINGS OF THE SPRING SEASON, dear friends! May you find renewal for your soul in times of silence and solitude in the midst of nature's beauty.
Confronting our own silences, and listening to ourselves, eventually moves us toward listening to other, previously unheard silences. To the silences in many who have had to quiet the expressive parts of themselves. To the silences of children, too often "shushed" as having nothing to contribute. To the silences of Earth, in its land and air and water, so often in pain where we have abused it, as well as to the faulty systems, structures, and customs that reinforce such troubling silence. As our listening deepens, we inevitably touch the Center of all stillness. In the midst of all the silences, we become able to hear the quiet Presence of the One who loves us, cherishes us, needs us... We meet the Holy Mystery whose listening to us is the primordial power, hearing us into speech.
We might sometimes reflect and recall that the purpose of all our science, technology, industry, manufacturing, commerce, and finance is celebration, planetary celebration. That is what moves the stars through the heavens and the earth through its seasons. The final norm of judgment concerning the success or failure of our technologies is the extent to which they enable us to participate more fully in this grand festival.
There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the undercurrents of the soil; but you have to be silent, willing to wait and receive.
Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon in long slow-motion movements of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize that this is the Earth -- home.
The silence in the giant redwood forest near my home draws me. Many mornings I get up early and dress hurriedly to get to the woods before the tour buses and the cars arriving with people from all over the world come to marvel at the majesty of nature. At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. The grandmother of silences. I find the silence even more remarkable than the trees.
How the elder loved nature! He loved it in three different ways: as angels, children, and sages love it. When he walked through the forest with us, we felt the power of his prayers. It was as though ranks of angels surrounded us. The elder said very little in the midst of nature, but if he did say something, then it was with such child-like joy and simplicity that his earthly age disappeared. Nature for the elder was a book of the holy revelations of God.
Gardens are spaces of inhabiting in which we are entrusted with the very continuity of life itself. Our job is not to oversee or control, but to plant, prune, water, feed and encourage growth. We either make of the garden a verdant refreshing oasis or a desert, stripped of nutrients and barren of new life.
Peacemaking is a call that has been discerned when our garden's ripeness shows that we have learned that we inhabit one great garden, our earth, when we have learned that we are but one interwoven fabric of created life charged with mutual and tender cultivation by the One who gave and gives us life.
BLESSINGS, dear friends, as we enter the Spring season ... a time to pause in prayer and enter the silence of our hearts, where the breathing of the Divine Guest lives and loves within us.
To pray is to discover God's oasis hidden in the desert of the soul. True prayer is the wellspring force of divine life flowing in the "transparent" soul of one whose trust is fully centered in God. This divine force, secret and strong, gently inspires all those who seek the truth; it will reunite them one day, beyond time and space, in the cosmic and eternal world. At the extremity of prayer words vanish, or rather the "silence-become-word" surpasses all that can be uttered. Prayer becomes the silence of Love, and this silence reveals the "I" in its deepest aspects; and, should words suddenly arise in prayer, we must regard them as fruits of love that send us back to silence.
~ from AWAKENING TO PRAYER by A. I. Okumura with thanks to Ana Maria Jones
Prayer may take the shape of sacrifice, supplication, adoration or meditation; it may even appear in simple daily acts of kindness; but it is always the outer visible sign of an inward communion with the Divine.
