Holy wisdom embraces and enables our knowledge, judgment, insight, even as it draws us beyond them. We are given words when we have nothing to say. We are kept silent when we ache to run off at the mouth. We reach out when we would otherwise pull back, cut off, turn away. Our own wisdom is rooted in God's gift of wisdom to us. The soil it grows in is our daily lives, including our relationships with God, ourselves, and others. Only by trusting what little we know, by pushing the edges of our own wisdom, will wisdom grow.
~ Jean M. Blomquist in "Weavings" - July/August 1997
The entirety of the contemplative life is grounded in the love of God. Without that love there would be no prayer ... nothing at all. This love calls into being -- creates, quickens, gives life to -- all that is. This love binds together each one to the other, and in the end binds us to the Source of that love, draws us back into the One whom we never really left, draws us back into God. In that returning we discover that there never existed a division between us and that ... the whole of life is in truth one continuous mystical experience because it has always been suffused with God's love.
~ from THE SMELL OF INCENSE, THE SOUND OF SILENCE by John W. Groff