Our being is silent, but our existence is noisy. Yet when our noisy actions stop, there is a ground of silence always there. Contemplatives must be in contact with that ground and communicate from that level to keep silence alive for other people.
Our being is silent, but our existence is noisy. Yet when our noisy actions stop, there is a ground of silence always there. Contemplatives must be in contact with that ground and communicate from that level to keep silence alive for other people.
In order to listen to God's silence we must escape the din of distractions that normally deafen us to it. Being deafened to the silence within as well as the silence without is corrosive to God-hearing. To be silent is to so empty oneself of the din of transitory distractions that one becomes fully receptive to the silence that always and everywhere underlies them. Silence is that state of spiritual sensitivity in which seekers make themselves available to the silence of God's voice.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.
Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better.
One way of moving beyond words in meditative journaling is by becoming attentive to the silence before, beneath, and between our words, both as we write and as we read back to ourselves what we have written. This allows us to become more attentive to the silence into which our silence sometimes leads us. Where we feel our writing taking us into the Silence, we simply go there and allow ourselves to be in the Silence, "letting the words flow to silence... "As we become aware of something stirring in the silence, we record it, "letting the silence speak to the word..."
The soul of each one of us has its destination, and that is the Sacred Heart that draws us to Itself. What is true of each one of us is true of all the world. Walt Whitman in his strong, urgent way cries:
One thought ever at the face—
That in the Divine Ship, the world breasting time and space,
All peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same voyage,
Are bound to the same destination.
Some such thought as this is surely necessary for the bare subsistence of a soul, for our soul cannot live without the sense of a destination ... the destination of Divine Love.
The soul possesses an ineffable intelligence that cannot be controlled. Like mist, the soul cannot be forced, directed, or squeezed into a box where it does not belong. It cannot even be fully seen or perceived, for the soul is a timeless, feathered thing that flies in more worlds than one.
Each of us possesses a soul, but we do not prize our soul as creatures made in the Divine image deserve, and so we do not understand the great secrets which they contain.
What exists between souls is love,
and that is all that exists.
Had I taken the fork of despair, I would have remained angry and depressed over the fire, missing a golden opportunity to move West, to be closer to my son. Looking back, I see that I was too attached to my old environment to make the move on my own. I needed the tragedy to push me onward. I don't mean to trivialize the difficulty of certain aspects of life. It is important to look for the larger picture. If we could see that everything, even tragedy, is a gift in disguise, we would then find the best way to nourish the soul . . . "Crises" can help us discover much about ourselves and enrich our lives.
What would become of our souls if they lacked the bread of earthly reality to nourish them, the wine of created beauty to intoxicate them, the discipline of human struggle to make them strong? What puny powers and bloodless hearts Your creatures would bring to You were they to cut themselves off prematurely from the providential setting in which You placed them!
Educate your inner being in all aspects of life. Keep to the order you learned during your schooling. You did not begin all of a sudden to grasp the higher subjects; you started by learning the alphabet. The same applies to your soul. It is not good for it to strive toward exalted feats until it becomes familiar with the spiritual alphabet: humility and obedience. Let the whole of your life become a continuous prayer.
Value your soul as priceless
for a cage without a bird has no value.
The soul seeks to serve; it inspires the personality to serve in particular ways and means. As that happens we become less and less interested in the personality aspect and more and more concerned in altruistic service for the benefit of all. The soul has no sense of being an individual, separate self and knows nothing of separation. It sees only the whole and itself in relation to the whole.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now: the frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move:
The thunder is the thundering of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us til we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul-size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
There are seasons in our souls: times of withering, times of coldness, times of renewal, times of sun and light. May the force which drives nature to its fulfillment be brought forth in us, too. Within each of us is the power to love and care awaiting our wills and our acts to bring it forth. Let us be instruments of the power oflove which comes through us but not from us, the power which waits for us to bring it forth.
This is essentially the argument for the soul: it holds reality together, it is my offscreen director, my presiding intelligence. I can think, talk, work, love, and dream, all because of the soul, yet the soul doesn't do any of these things. It is me... Everything that makes the difference between life and death must cross into this world via the soul... Soul is a connection between the world of the five senses and a world of inconceivable things like eternity, infinity, omniscience, grace, and every other quality unmanifest.
Like billowing clouds,
like the incessant gurgle of the brook,
the longing of the soul can never be stilled.
The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.
The contemplation of Eternity maketh the Soul immortal.
The love of God, unutterable and perfect
flows into a pure soul the way that light
rushes into a transparent object.
The more love that it finds, the more it gives
itself; so that, as we grow clear and open,
the more complete the joy of loving is.
And the more souls who resonate together,
the greater the intensity of their love,
for, mirror-like, each soul reflects the others.
Think of your work not as a place to make a living, but as an opportunity to make a life. Think of yourself as a channel through which creative activities flow.
Douglas Steere writes in WORK AND CONTEMPLATION of occasional moments of transcendence, as "ripples of ecstasy, when our deepest creative impulse, our spring of freedom, is drawn upon and released . . . And in such moments of utter self-absorption, we are lifted above both pain and pleasure. "These moments move us beyond the ordinary labors of our lives. They often occur when we have been in the company of strangers. They require time, and they invite Love.
The purpose of this world is not to have and hold, but to give and serve.
I was invited to a barn raising near Wooster, Ohio. A tornado had leveled 4 barns and acres of prime Amish timber. In just three weeks the downed trees were sawn into girders, posts and beams and the 4 barns rebuilt and filled with livestock donated by neighbors to replace those killed in the storm. I watched the raising of the last barn in open-mouthed awe. Some 400 Amish men and boys, acting and reacting like a hive of bees in absolute harmony of cooperation, started at sunrise with only a foundation and floor and by noon, BY NOON, had the huge edifice far enough along that you could put hay in it -- a vast work, born of the spirit.
Each person, no matter how old, has an important work to do. This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world, but completes something in us. The work we do in the world, when it is true vocation, always corresponds in some mysterious way to the work that goes on within us.
For me, the question is whether my encounter with death has freed me enough from the addictions of the world that I can be true to my Work as I now see it "sent" from above. It clearly involves a call to prayer, contemplation, silence, solitude, and inner detachment. I have to keep choosing my "not belonging" in order to belong, my not being from below in order to be from above. For, the taste of God's unconditional love quickly disappears when the addictive powers of everyday existence make their presence felt again.
Be a gardner.
Dig a ditch,
toil and sweat
and turn the earth upside down
and seek deepness
and water the plants in time.
Continue this labor
and make sweet floods to run
and noble and abundant fruits
to spring.
Take this food and drink
and carry it to God
as your worship.
The wise work diligently without allegiance to words.
They teach by doing, not by saying;
they are genuinely helpful,
not discriminating,
positive, not possessive.
They do not proclaim their accomplishments,
and because they do not proclaim them,
credit for them can never be taken away.
A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through detours or art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which that person's heart first opened.
Twenty years ago, when I was near death from a life-threatening illness, a vivid dream was more real than life. Floating out of my body, I rose up, up, and up inside the clouds above. With no door visible, I nevertheless knocked, repeatedly demanding entry. The sky whitened with my greeting as a Large Voice stated, "You have got a lot of work to do. "It sent me down, down back into my body with the life-long question: What is my Work? Is my present action leading to my Work?
If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering.
In order to continually re-imagine ourselves through our work lives, we must have a part of us that belongs to something beyond the status quo. Something over the horizon or, paradoxically, beneath us, in the ground of our life. Something as yet hidden, yet to be brought to light. Something which is governed by other laws than the ones we so assiduously obey every day. Something to do with the laws that govern the way we belong to this stubborn and beautiful world.
As we enable others to work
with meaning, mutual
fulfillment becomes a
building block to peace
and smiles become contagious.
We are asking,
May Work with Meaning
flourish on Earth.
How can we discern the true freedom of our soul, the freedom in which everything is given, from the promises and practices of personal liberation? Mystics who have given themselves to love know what is beyond the borders of culture and conditioning. They inhabit a region of the soul where love and service are given freely and there is neither striving nor achievement. Living a relationship of oneness, they recognize that the deepest longing of their heart belongs not to themselves but to their Beloved... Belonging neither to this world or the next, they are servants of love and carry the wisdom that comes from a commitment to love.
Most people want solitude because they want to discover their unconditional freedom, where they are free of all definitions.
To lie fallow is a gift. We don't really know how to do it. Rather we are done by it or undone by it. The moments we are allowed to be in that condition are times of gratitude. It is from these that our freedom comes. It is where authentic being exists. Any fruitfulness arises from that surrendered openness. It is there that God makes each of us a fertile ground, a bearing soil.
Spirit's gift of freedom comes to us as a conscious rhapsody of being chosen and choosing. We are journeyed through life by mysterious Spirit that will not let us be till we grasp our freedom, with fear and fascination, till we say yes or no. This is the glory of being human: experiencing being chosen to decide, and deciding, again and again, endlessly. This is the conscious rhapsody of our lives.
Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool streams gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word "Water," first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly, I felt a misty caress as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!
Freedom is not an end in itself. It is not just freedom from something; it must also be freedom for something. In the spiritual life, freedom is for nothing other than love. Human beings exist because of love, and the meaning and goal of our lives is love.
Those who are disciplined with joy and light within become one with God and reach the freedom that is God.
Play is our contact with our love for life. It brings us back into our joy at being alive and shows us where our freedom is. Play moves us out of our fixed mindsets: it offers freedom from the tyranny of habit, freedom from the mundane and ordinary, from the rational and need to know and be in control. It is freedom from rigid identification with race, class, gender, and even species.
The inner spirit is who I really am. My body is alive in this nature and exists in its frame. I do not need to be spiritual to find this. I only need to stop believing that the ego, the small self, is me. If I do, a different knowing emerges which has a largeness and a certain beauty. It is an expression of power and love beyond the usual definitions. To live in its knowledge is to know yourself to be free.
In the last years of his life, Rultin was fond of repeating a statement attributed to A. Philip Randolph: "The struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final act. "A few months before Rultin died, a young admirer asked how he kept hopeful in dismally conservative times. "I have learned a very significant message from the prophets," Rultin replied. "They taught that God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What is required of us is that we not stop trying."
Consider freedom: find an inner freedom and then,
however constraining the circumstances are,
it will not diminish your internal freedom.
There's such beauty in sharing the distinctive songs of our own souls as we dance with the grand web of life, each of us embodying particular forms, energies, and rhythms, bringing into the world our unique purposes, passions, and gifts. The tapestry of our lives is colored with freedom when we are guided by our own creativity and knowing.