Quotations

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.

No voice;
but oh! the silence sank
Like music on my heart.

I experienced in myself a curious phenomenon: I was listening with the heart. And if I just listened, through the heart, just listened, and no thinking was involved in it, then the heart sang with the violins, it was the trumpet call, it was the woodwinds, and I was the music.

The one who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.

Outer silence, the deep true silence of nature and prayer, calls forth the silence hidden within one's inner being. For to be other than silent in the stillness of the forest or the chapel seems inappropriate and irreverent. In silence, the rare times I attain true inner silence, I recognize my inner self, and I am also aware of God's presence in me as well as a loving, merciful gaze upon me. It is in the mutual gazing upon the infinite and the infinite upon me that I find peace. Oh, why then, silence, are you so hard to attain when you bring so much joy? Why do I so often avoid you? Because the silence is where God is to be found? You have such gifts to give. While our inner being is often noisy, filled with less than productive chattering of the mind, you are always waiting for us to accept you presence in us. To be still, to be silent brings its own gifts. The reward is in the stillness, in the silence, in the sitting.

Spirit that hears each one of us,
Hears all that is --
Listens, listens, hear us out --
Inspire us now!
Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat,
And also there within the flowered ground beneath our feet,
And -- teach us to listen! --
We can hear it in water, in wood, and even in stone.
We are earth of this earth, and we are bone of its bone.
This is a prayer I sing, for we have forgotten this,
And so,
The earth is perishing.

A long and loving look at the universe we inhabit can actually change us. We can become different persons.

Prayer with nature is a passionate listening to the beating heart of the world. It is appreciation. And it is always praise.

Let us plant dates, even though those who plant them will never eat them ... We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved away in immediate sense experience, and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.

Just as a whole world of beauty can be discovered in one flower, so the great grace of God can be tasted in one small moment.

PEACE be with you ... PEACE be among the nations! During this Lenten season, may the wind of the Spirit that drove Jesus into the desert, into the furnace of prayer, also drive us with a passion to enkindle the fire of our devotion in the desert of Lenten love.

No one can know the ultimate mystery. We never will. But we can invest our lives with courage, dignity, sympathy, understanding, in such a way as to take the utterly crazy things that happen and transform them into a joyful and creative illumination. I am in search of the creativity that is at the center of human-beingness. I cannot know where this lies until I get there, but I have faith it is there where one aspect of God is. All of this implies my dealing with the opposite of what I am used to, a passive and quiet listening to what life says. To learn how to be.

Many of us live under the illusion that if we are not for good or for evil we can exist in some moral limbo. The reality is that if we do not choose to be given for the purposes of God, then we are available to be used for the purposes of evil. To be unconscious is to leave oneself open to being manipulated; to be awake and weeping is to be in touch with reality and available to be poured-out-through by the love of God.

Returning to the source of one's being is rarely an experience that can be expressed in words. Kabir says, 'Those who have had a taste of this love are so enchanted that they are stricken with silence.' Have you ever been 'stricken with silence'? If so, you have tasted the ineffable; you have had a mystical experience. Silence is too often defined as 'the absence of something' when it is much more than that. Silence is also a search for something, a search for the depths, for the source ... Silence moves people. Being, one my say, is silent. We must embrace silence in order to express being. Then -- and only then -- does it speak deep truths to us ...

In prayerful solitude I find not only God and myself but the world and all in it, not as it sees itself but as it stands in reality.

... the affairs of the world, like those of the stars, are in God's hands -- and therefore in good hands. And yet it is so difficult to have genuine faith in God's action in the affairs of the world. And so, the poor life of our soul goes on, in the light of unreal faith and sentimentalism. Halfway between God and the world there is a confusion of aspirations, contradictions and compromises.

Yet, in the depths of our hearts we know ... it is love which must determine our actions, love which must give unity to what is divided. Love is the synthesis of contemplation and action, the meeting-point between heaven and earth, between God and us ... I have known the satisfaction of unrestrained action, and the joy of the contemplative life in the dazzling peace of the desert, and I repeat St. Augustine's words: 'Love and do as you will.' Don't worry about what you are to do. Concentrate on loving instead. And by loving you will find out what is for you. Loving, you will listen to the Voice. Loving, you will find peace. In the end, Love is the solution to every problem, the motive for all good.

May the day soon come with all peoples of the world will choose to walk in the direction of Love! Amen.

It is the task of the teacher to set the heart aflame with an unquenchable fire of longing ... and, to keep it burning until it is reduced to ashes. For only a heart which has burned itself empty is capable of love.

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve,
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do greater things,
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy,
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.

I asked for power, that I might have the praise of people,
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,
I as given life, that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for -- but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among all men and women, most richly blessed.

We have to be on our guard against wanting to judge for ourselves what point we have reached in the way of pure love. Only God knows this. What we recognize of ourselves, also of our faults and failings, is only the illuminated part of the surface. The deep roots are also hidden from us. God, who knows these, can purify them.

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude...
There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.
However. It helps to understand that the fire burns,
and when it rains, the earth gets wet...

Alone, in the cave that he loved so well near the summit of Mt. Subasio, Francis met God again ... Silence and solitude had become dear and sweet to Francis. As he reflected on that, he remembered a time when it was not so. In his youth, he dreaded and took refuge in the gaiety and laughter and frolicking of his friends. Always, at the edge of his consciousness, however, was the somber specter called Aloneness.

That's the way Aloneness appeared to Francis then -- a specter, a mortal enemy bearing a sickle in its hand. It was only when he finally met that specter head on, after his conversion experience, that he found the IT became HER; and then he made friends with her. She became, in fact, his best friend and constant companion.

It was a struggle of course, a struggle to be alone and to allow the pain of loneliness to be transformed into the sweetness of solitude. It didn't come easily and without countless ways in which he had to let the specter within him die. Gradually, he saw that the specter was an illusion -- a figment of his own imagining.

Now, as Francis retrieved himself from the reverie, he thought to himself guiltily, I'm supposed to be praying. Then he smiled. He knew the reverie was part of his prayer, an important part. It was through such a reverie that he had come in the first place to understand solitude for what it really was: togetherness.

The root of friendship is prayer, because the root of prayer is presence -- presence to all that is. It is not easy to be present with oneself. We spend most of our time in a flight from prayer, which is a flight from ourselves. We can take only so much of ourselves; but it is only in a radical presence to ourselves, in a coming to say "I am", that we can be present to the One who is all that we are. Our presence to Christ becomes a compelling force to be present to others. We can know that we are living in Christ, that Christ is living in us because we are invited to share in Christ's spirit. Open your hearts to one another as Christ's heart is opened to you, and God will be glorified. Each one of us has been entrusted with a gift which is intended for one another.

For those who listen in the stillness of their hearts, there comes a time to put what is heard into action and to stand up against that which is unjust, to live that which is beauty and justice...

Is it not true that somewhere deep down in the silence of our troubled hearts, we have always looked for God's coming? Yet, in the last analysis, we need only say our yes to who we are ... we need simply to become more responsive to the secret yearning of our heart, which we often lock up but can never squelch entirely. Inasmuch as we are open and receptive, then we are truly men and women in waiting, advent creatures who allow Love to approach them and look forward to God's coming.

Attending in readiness waiting
My soul meets yours,
Enter, Oh Holy Spirit,
Creation's Lord.

Tending in rapt devotion
Spirit's gentle touch --
Open as an infant's gaze
More insistent than any pain.

Open in steadiness attending
Creation's one and all,
Trusting Its wondrous tenderness.
Am I at least Its child?

I live my Advent in the womb of Mary.
And on one night when a great star swings free
from its high mooring and walks down the sky
to be the dot above the Christus i,
I shall be born of her by blessed grace.
I wait in Mary-darkness, faith's walled place,
with hope's expectance of nativity.

I knew for long she carried me and fed me,
guarded and loved me, though I could not see.
But only now, with inward jubilee,
I come upon earth's most amazing knowledge:
SOMEONE IS HIDDEN IN THIS DARK WITH ME.