And, if we are unwilling to practice the gift of contemplation and find time for solitude, we miss so much along the way. Admiral Byrd's journal is filled with the fruits that silence brings:
I took my daily walk at 4 p.m. today in -89 degrees of frost ... I paused to listen to the silence ... The day was dying, the night being born -- but with great peace. Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence -- a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres...
What prompts this surrender -- this total turning to God in self-donation and makes it possible is the realistic recognition that my very life and being is a gift of love. It is a recognition which becomes experiential in contemplative prayer, in a "knowing" that is beyond knowledge; it is the graced knowledge of love. Only such a gift can make unconditional self-surrender possible, for it is an experience of the unconditional love of a person, a personal God. It is such a recognition that breaks forth joyously in Daniel Berrigan's "All, all is gift. Give it away. Give it away."
What prompts this surrender -- this total turning to God in self-donation and makes it possible is the realistic recognition that my very life and being is a gift of love. It is a recognition which becomes experiential in contemplative prayer, in a "knowing" that is beyond knowledge; it is the graced knowledge of love. Only such a gift can make unconditional self-surrender possible, for it is an experience of the unconditional love of a person, a personal God. It is such a recognition that breaks forth joyously in Daniel Berrigan's "All, all is gift. Give it away. Give it away."
To see every woman and every man as sister and brother is to participate in the faith vision of the mystic, whose central intuition is a graced effect of contemplation, which gradually transforms our way of seeing reality. This mystical vision is far from an esoteric or "misty" dream, for surely the survival of our planet depends on a universal realization of this unity and the interconnectedness of all peoples and of all the cosmos, in the one Love which is God.
