BLESSINGS to all Friends of Silence this holyday season! ... a time for re-connecting to the Child within that leads us to our gifts ... our creativity ... our inner being where innocence, compassion and spontaneity dwell.
Children do not yet "know" enough to resist the force that governs and guides them from one goodness to the next. They haven't yet been fooled by their senses into practicing the impractical practice of trying to run their own lives and prove themselves in relation to others. So they show us what the scriptures teach -- that there is something we can trust. Our superficial perspective fools us all into seeking security by hanging on to certain interpersonal conditions and experiences in what is, after all, an exploding universe of divine self-revelation. This places us in opposition to the current of life and prevents us from increasingly seeing and expressing the unfolding good of God. Yet in the silence, we too can learn to go with and be carried along by the flow -- from one liberating revelation of the great eternal One to the next.
The great solitaries always surprise us by their acute understanding of life. Prayer of positive, creative quality needs a background of silence, we need not hope to know the power of prayer
How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given.
So God imparts to human hearts
The wonders of Love's heaven.
In the center of the city, I am that child that screams in the tenement, the infant that cries in the night holding out its arms to be comforted. I am the young man and woman searching for their way. I am the weary, the wounded, the cold and hungry asking, "why?" ... the old and all who know pain and are acquainted with grief. The loved, the unloved, the abandoned, the lonely and the homeless ... I am all who thirst for the Way. I am child of God, of the Mysterious One, the Immutable, and a child of timeless time. I have no color and speak no language ... and yet, pushed down, way down to the bottom of the Cave to touch the Divine Flame, I become part of everyone and everyone is part of me. The way below and the way above is lit with the golden match of love. Thanks be to the name that cannot be named.
... written by Arpie Shelton after being in a coma. She wrote: "I could see as if for the very first time ever."
I sought of old the womb of a woman so that I might become a human being. Now I seek a soul by means of which I can bring my love to all people. I will take your poverty and I will fill it to the limit. Believe. Love. Trust. Let yourself be carried by my waves, by my winds. You will find me again in your soul, simple and humble, a Child.
The divine life enkindled in the soul is the Light that has come into the darkness; it is the miracle of the holy night.
The new or divine begetting is just as real as the first begetting in the mother's womb. The child of God is forever being born.
I am your reed, sweet shepherd, glad to be.
Now, if you will, breathe out your joy in me
And make bright song.
Or fill me with the soft moan of your love
When your delight has failed to call or move
The flock from wrong.
Make children's songs, or any songs, to fill
Your reed with breath of life;
But at your will, lay down the flute,
And take repose, while music infinite
Is silence in your heart; and laid on it
Your reed is mute.
When you reach the state of contemplation, live contemplation, you are finally at peace, like a child on its mother's breast: "My soul is tranquil and quiet like a child in its mother's arms." (Psalm 131:2)
Magnetized by God's love, the rocket of your soul, like an astronaut's space-craft, has broken the sound-barrier (no longer needs a lot of words to explain itself), snapped the thread of gravity which held it down to itself (No longer needs meditation) and gone into orbit like a tiny planet around God's sun.
The first proof that you have gone into orbit round God is that you no longer feel that you are the centre of the universe -- which is the real nature of sin -- but feel and vividly understand that God is the centre of everything. This might seem easy, but ... how much effort goes into reaching this understanding!
Now at last God bears you, leads you by "ways which are not our ways", draws you into the whirlpool of charity, prepares you for an ever deeper union with the Beloved, for that eternal possession of love which is the goal of our human-divine destiny.
The soul in orbit round God begins to realize that there is another stability than the kind known and experienced on earth, another fullness, another dimension. Above all, another "peace”.