The experience of prayer is the experience of coming into full union with the energy that created the universe. What Christianity has to proclaim to the world is that that energy is LOVE and it is the well-spring out of which all creation flows. It is the well-spring that gives each one of us the creative power to be the person we are called to be -- a person rooted and formed in love.
The person who loves never abandons contemplation. On the contrary, s/he alone thirsts for it in the right spirit ... God gives Love to those in prayer, and the more s/he loves others, the better s/he can understand. Being filled with God's love, one is capable of a new love for one another -- a joyful and self-forgetting love. Love brings contemplation itself into the mystery of change. It is no longer a neutral point from which the transformations of love are beheld; it is carried away in the flood of the love which is ever the same and ever new, forever changing.
Good is holy silence and giving of holiday to every sense.
Silence is the home of the word. Silence gives strength and fruitfulness to the word. We can even say that words are meant to disclose the mystery of the silence from which they come ... Words can only create communion and thus new life when they embody the silence from which they emerge ... Thus silence is the mystery of the future world. It keeps us pilgrims and prevents us from becoming entangled in the cares of this age. It guards the fire of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. It allows us to speak a word that participates in the creative and recreative power of God's own Word.
When one says to the great Thinker: "Here is one of your thoughts: I am thinking it now," that is a prayer -- a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.
"I have often repented of having spoken ... but never of having remained silent."
To pray is never to get over the wonder of being born, of being alive. To pray is to live in the profound gratitude that no matter what happens, we're ahead. To pray is to be in reverence, in awe, in joy with some moment of each day. There are no perfect days, but there is a beautiful moment in each day that draws us into prayer ... consciously or unconsciously.
O Lord, the Author and Persuador of peace, love and goodwill, soften hearts that are hard and steely ... warm hearts frozen by fear, that we may wish well to one another, and may be true followers of the Way of Love. And give us grace even now to show forth that heavenly life, wherein fear does not abide -- but peace and love on all hands, one toward another. Amen.