The new challenge for all peoples is to broaden our sense of spiritual community, becoming fully ecumenical not only concerning whom we pray FOR, but also concerning whom we pray WITH. If humankind can begin to pray together we can begin to live together, finding new and creative ways to reduce the evils which plague our planet. But how can we pray together with integrity, when we differ so much in beliefs? The best way to being to pray and meditate together is in SILENCE. Words are not enough. In silence we can sense that we are not separate from anyone, and so we can dare to hope for peace. For silence to "work", participants must bring to it some degree of trust, love, and letting-go: a trust in the good-will of the others which moves them to join in such an expression of human caring; a love which brings a sense of heart-felt connection with the others as human beings; and a letting-go for a short time of our desperate clinging to the convictions which separate and divide us, letting these recede to the background of consciousness. After the silence, we return to deal with the same differences, but in a different spiritual climate.
For millennia, a genuine cri du coeur, cry of the heart — a longing for a taste of mystery, a touch of the sacred — the yearning to embark upon a meaningful journey has been answered by pilgrimage, a transformative journey to a sacred center. It calls for a journey to a holy site associated with gods, saints, or heroes, or to a natural setting imbued with spiritual power...always, it is a journey of risk and renewal. For a journey without challenge has no meaning; one without purpose has no soul.
No one really knows what the soul is, but tremble forth it does and, just as mysteriously, shudders away again...The soul is the name for the unifying principle, power, or energy that is at the center of our being. To be in touch with soul means going back to the sacred source, the site of life-releasing energy, the activating force of life; to venture forth and confront the world in all its marvelous and terrifying forces, to make sacred our hours here; to learn to pay such supreme attention to the world that eternity blazes into time with our holy longing. Soul-making, this.
~ from THE SOUL OF THE WORLD, edited by Phil Cousineau