The fruit of silence is known only to those with experience. There is gradually born within us in and of our silence itself, something that will draw us on to still greater silence. God leads us into solitude to speak to our heart. Let our hearts be a living altar from which there constantly ascends before God pure prayer, with which all our acts should be imbued.
~ from LISTENING TO SILENCE, comp. by R. B. Lockhart
In what sense can individual strands be torn from the one fabric of reality and be considered complete? My well-being will come only in relationship to our well-being and the well-being of all things. We are being invited to seek a new salvation. It will come through and with one another, not in separation from one another.
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?... In part, it is to say that wisdom is deep within us, deeper than the ignorance of what we may have done or become... When we lose touch with the wisdom that is within us, we live out of ignorance... Grace is given not to implant in us a foreign wisdom but to make us alive to the wisdom that was born in us.
Nature and grace are viewed as flowing together from God. They are both sacred gifts. The gift of nature ... is the gift of "being"; the gift of grace, on the other hand, is the gift of "well-being." Grace is given to reconnect us to our true nature.
Just as God speaks to us through the words of scripture, so God speaks to us through the elements of creation. The cosmos is like a living sacred text that we can learn to read and interpret. Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice, and as other traditions study their sacred texts, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God.
