O Mystery, You are life. I feel you all around
You are the fire in my heart, You are the holy sound.
You are all of life. It is to You I sing.
Grant that I may feel You, always in every thing.
Ah, friends, Spring has come once again! BLESSINGS and PEACE be with you! As our thoughts begin to turn toward gardening and enjoying the new life coming to birth around us, we are invited to spend time in our own cloister garden of the heart. For,
We need quiet time in the presence of God. Although we want to make all our time time for God, we will never succeed if we do not reserve a specific and consistent amount of time to listen in the Silence. This asks for much discipline and risk-taking, because we often have something more urgent to do and "just sitting there" and "doing nothing" may disturb us more than it helps. But there is no way around this. Being useless and silent in the presence of God belongs to the core of all prayer. In the beginning, we often hear our own unruly inner noises more loudly than God's voice. This is at times very hard to tolerate. But slowly, very slowly, we discover that the silent time makes us quiet and deepens our awareness of ourselves and God. Then, very soon, we start to miss these moments when we are deprived of them, and before we are fully aware of it, an inner momentum has developed that draws us more and more into silence and closer to that still point where God speaks to us.
~ from SEEDS OF HOPE: A HENRI NOUWEN READER ed. Robert Durback
Contemplation is the central human act that puts us perceptively and lovingly in touch with the innermost reality of everything because it is a simple intuition of the truth.
The silence of contemplation! Within each of us lie unknown gulfs of doubt, violence, secret distress ... as well as guilt, of things unacknowledged, so that gaping below our feet we sense an immense void. As we let divine love pray in us, trusting as a child, one day these gulfs will be inhabited. And, one day we shall discover that there has been a revolution in ourselves. With time, contemplation begets a happiness. And, that happiness is the drive behind our struggle for and with all people. It is courage, energy to take risks. It is overflowing gladness.
I cried to God,
I beat upon the door
Until my knuckles bled;
God gave me no answer, gave no sign.
"There is no God," I sad.
I stopped my clamor
And lay spent,
A channel at ebb tide,
And slowly in the silence
The door swung wide.
The truth of the hermitage comes down to paradoxes. It empties us so we may be filled; its simplicity is a luxury, and we go there seeking solitude so we can better serve God's people ... Whether we serve as parents, as pastors, as missionaries, as teachers, as peace-makers -- there is a monk in all of us. To get in touch with the silence of God is necessary for everyone. The hermitage allows people to get in touch with that silence. That does not mean the touch only happens here. But it can be refreshed here. It can be strengthened.
The life of prayer is a journey with God as well as toward God, a journey in which prayer becomes for those who pursue it as natural as breathing. The first big step is to cease talking TO God and start listening FOR God. And that requires silence. Silence is the language God speaks, and everything else is a translation. "As long as you know you are praying, you are not praying properly", says Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. When everything we do is prayer, the fruit is an increase in love, patience and compassion for others, leaving behind the unmistakable taste of holiness.
~ from "Talking to God", Newsweek, January 6, 1992
In some religions, prayer is undertaken, not with the intention of influencing a deity, nor with any hope of prayers being directly answered, but in order to produce a harmonious state of mind. Prayer and meditation facilitate integration by allowing time for previously unrelated thoughts and feelings to interact. Being able to get in touch with one's deepest thoughts and feelings, and providing time for them to regroup themselves into new formations and combinations, are important aspects of the creative process, as well as a way of relieving tension and promoting mental health ... Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one's own inner world are all facilitated by solitude.
~ from SOLITUDE: A RETURN TO THE SELF by Anthony Storr
Blessed are You, Heart of my heart!
for You heed the cry of my spirit.
You are my strength and my protection;
into your hands I commend my soul.
My heart leaps as You come to my aid,
and my lament becomes
a song of exultation,
a shout of praise to You,
O my Comforter!
May the blessed light be on you, light without and light within. May the blessed sunlight shine on you and warm your heart until it glows like a fire, so that a stranger may come and warm himself at it, and also a friend. May God always bless you, love you and keep you.
I have found a loving, caring presence as I have listened to my dreams, listened to the silence in the middle of the night and meditated on scripture. In my deepest experience of worship and Eucharist, and in my time of quiet companionship with God, I have met a Divine Lover. I find this Loving One is always there desiring to draw me closer to Love. Again and again, I hear gentle suggestions, when I listen in the midst of troubles, that my best way through them is by practicing unconditional love.
~ from REACHING: THE JOURNEY TO FULFILLMENT by Morton Kelsey
"Compassion not only helps us co-operate with the movement of Christ's love, it also fulfils us by increasing our capacity to relate to others without which there is no maturity ... The spark in the soul draws a person deeper into the love of the Creator and of the world in a process of mutual enabling. It is impossible to love others in this way while nourishing prejudice, fear and grievances." Compassion invites us to times of silence and to radical trust ... "God, I trust in your sustaining love and believe that just as You give me the grace and desire to offer this, so You will also bestow abundant grace to fulfill it."
If your spirit is not fit to see the Beloved, neither will your heart be a bright mirror, fit to reflect love. It is true that no eye is able to contemplate and marvel at Love's beauty, nor is it capable of understanding; one can no feel toward the Beloved as one feels toward the beauty of this world. But by abounding Grace, we have been given a mirror to reflect the Beloved, and this mirror is the heart. Look into your heart and there you will see Love's image.
~ from THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS by Farid ud-Din Attar and Afkham Darbandi
Blessed are the consistent in heart; they shall contemplate the one.
Healthy are those whose passion is electrified by deep, abiding purpose; they shall regard the power that moves and shows itself in all things.
Aligned with the One are those whose lives radiate from a core of love; they shall see God everywhere.
Resisting corruption are those whose natural reaction is sympathy and friendship; they shall be illuminated by a flash of lightning: the Source of the soul's movement in all creatures.
~ from PRAYERS OF COSMOS: MEDITATIONS ON THE ARAMAIC WORDS OF JESUS by Neil Douglas-Klotz
In the core of the human soul there is a central silence. It is here that God enters into the soul. A person finds 'unity and blessing in that little spark in the soul, which neither space nor time touches.' Here is to be found a light that 'wants to penetrate the simple core, the still desert ... to get into the secret, to which no one is privy, where it is satisfied by a light whose unity is greater than it's own. This core is a simple stillness...
The Beloved listens
as I dovetail words
into walls
and walk in winter landscapes.
None of the alien, snowbanked roads
lead home. Even as I speak,
the shadows shift
across the stones
I have tried
to mortar into place.
The beloved listens
and weaves willow silences
into my words.
The quietness of Love
builds me a better harbor
than words ever could,
a place from which to sail,
a place to remember
on the map I navigate by,
where the heart of the compass rose is home.
God truly wishes all to eat and drink deeply of Infinite Love. Alas, how few seek ardently and perseveringly to move beyond desiring only the things of this world that cannot satisfy the burning longing that has been placed in all human hearts to possess God's everlasting Love! ... It is possible for the contemplative to become so centered in the heart with the presence of the indwelling Christ that the thought and presence of the Beloved are always somewhere close to waking consciousness, even in sleep. Christ is operating, even in sleep, in dreams and in delicate movements of the heart, so that it can be said that such a contemplative never loses awareness of Love's presence, never stops "listening" to Love's voice.
~ from SINGERS OF THE NEW SONG by George A. Maloney
Oh how our values fail us!
Beauty doesn't come from a package.
It shines as a whole.
Love doesn't come from a greeting card.
It dwells in the heart, radiating the soul.
May the light of love be shining
deep within your spirit
May the torch of mercy clear the path
and show the way
May the horn of plenty sound
so everyone can hear it
May the light of love be with you every day.
Somehow, I must sit to listen.
Standing implies a readiness for action, for the executing of the will.
To hear You I must sit down and calm down.
The magpie mind chatters.
It doesn't know about stopping.
How helpless I feel in its automatic firing, its busy babbling.
It is impossible to hear You as long as I am full of sound.
I turn this helpless prayer toward You.
... slowly unknowing everything, becoming dark,
becoming yielding ... just sitting.
~ from BEING HOME by Gunilla Norris with thanks to Marjorie Michael
