In embracing creativity as a spiritual practice, we commend ourselves into the Creator's
hands, knowing that our goal is to disappear. And when we do, we become one with
all creation. The divine spirit dances us, it plays its music through us. We become the
instrument through which the divine flows like a river. When your Creative Self calls,
go with it. It is God speaking. Listen to your Creative Conscience, the voice of the
divine guiding you each day. It resides in your heart: your true temple.
~ Lucia Capacchione in THE SOUL OF CREATIVITY, ed. by Tona P. Myers
To begin to enter into the profound silence that resides in the depths of our beings is to begin to enter the realm of the Godhead beyond God. Beyond speech, beyond apprehension, is a realm of generative actuality, the realm of essential being out of which the Word is eternally begotten. Our silence is both and the clear road by which the Word proceeds most directly into our hearts.
For the abbas (fathers) and ammas (mothers) of the desert, solitude with its silence was a creative medium, a forge of transformation through which the false self in its adaptation to the pride, luxury, lust for power, and greed of the "world" was melted away in the fires of spiritual discernment. One emerged from the silence as a transformed self ... a person of humility, compassion, and responsiveness to the Word of God.
Silence was much more than not speaking, it was mostly a quality of heart. It was the creation of an inner space where genuine listening takes place. The ammas and abbas knew that in silence the Word most readily takes root.
~ from THE VIGIL by Wendy M. Wright with thanks to Elizabeth Fribance
