In authentic contemplation, we discover within ourselves the hidden living and loving Companion Presence. We need to go to the solitude and silence of the wilderness, where God calls us by name, to a deeper place. This is where we are filled with the peace that the world cannot give and which the world cannot take from us. We discover there that we have and always shall be in God. It is the spacious place of the soul. To live there is finally to be at home. God is also at home there, and when we return, we have discovered simplicity.
~ from SIMPLICITY: THE ART OF LIVING by Richard Rohr
Silence is the sea which best bears up our prayers. Silence creates possibility -- the possibility of hearing. What we learn to do in silence is to create within ourselves silence, to create within ourselves emptiness, to brush aside all words, all concepts, all feelings, all fantasies, all anxieties, all ambition -- gently to brush away all these things that seem so important -- to let them go and to empty ourselves so that if the word is spoken we may hear it, and if the song is sung, we may attend.
In silence we do not try to be anything or anyone ... we give up trying to be, and simply are -- we become being -- or, to put it another way, we must become nothing in order that we may once again become that which we truly are.
