Lord, am I such a pain in the neck? I see you everywhere, yet turn from your presence in the faces of my wife and children. I look for your face everywhere and then spit in your face -- in the faces of those you give me to love ... and in whom you offered your love for me again and again in a million imperfect ways every day. I turn from them if they aren't just so -- just perfect. Nevertheless, your quiet is finally growing in me ... I want to calm my restless feelings, Lord, and look deeply into the faces of my family and see you face to face as we talk during our meal.
To see the face of God in those you love and live with takes consistent commitment and concentration. It is the same contemplative act that one experiences in the stillness and silence of solitary prayer and adoration. It takes simultaneous attention to the "without" and the "within", to self and to other. It is a paradox, a simultaneous joining while remaining solitary and separate. It resembles the act of physical touching and loving. It is separate togetherness and oneness experienced separately at the instant it is shared.
~ from BECOMING AN EVERYDAY MYSTIC by James W. Warnke
Real love is always difficult, as the German poet Rilke said, because "it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another, it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances." Eventually, love forces us to turn within. In the Symposium, his meditation on love, Plato called love a child of fullness and emptiness, suggesting that there is a kind of desolation built into every love. There comes a moment in the progress of most loves when lovers feel isolated and unfulfilled, because they have discovered that they cannot find real and enduring meaning by reaching outside themselves, clinging to their lover. . . They may see that it is only by daring to open to the silence at the center of themselves that they can begin to feel the presence of the One whom they have been searching for all along.
~ from TRANSFORMATIONS: AWAKENING TO THE SACRED IN OURSELVES by Tracy Cochran and Jeff Zaleski
