Quotations

Solitude builds up, affords a conscious setting in which significant growth in the life of the Spirit can take place. Solitude is a gift of time without accompanying distraction, an opportunity to keep company with one's own soul. It is where the Spirit can help one harness one's own cross in such a way that it can be carried without too great strain... Solitude is conducive to journaling, reflection, meditation and is indispensable to contemplation.

To move toward the desert where interior prayer and interior transformation can take place means a willingness to go into the desert, to learn to shut the door, and to move into the necessary solitude which prayer and the deeper levels of worship require.

Solitude is a return to one's own self when the world has become filled with people and too much of a response to others. Solitude is as much an intrinsic desire in us as our gregariousness. Hermits, solitary thinkers, independent spirits, recluses, although often stigmatized in the modern world, are healthy expressions of our dialogue with ourself.

Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Loneliness is the sign that something is lacking. The purpose of solitude is to bring us home to the center of ourselves with such serenity that we could lose everything and, in the end, lose nothing of the fullness of life at all. When you are alone, are you lonely or are in solitude? If loneliness is what it's about, what you may need most is the cultivation of the richness of solitude.

When I retreat at home, I am alone in silence. But I am also with thousands of others around the world, sitting quietly, all of us bonded together in our effort, our solitude, and our prayers... We are opening our hearts, alone but all-one, joining others throughout the centuries in timeless realms.

We are born to make manifest the Glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

I am the Light.
The Light moves in me.
The Light moves through me.
The Light surrounds me.
The Light protects me.
I am the Light.

What is to give light must endure burning.

I turned off the light and drifted into that floating sensation, not asleep but drowsy, half awake and half asleep. Often, while in this state -- lovely, unknown faces float before me -- but this morning the experience was different. A perfect face of a child came before me in profile -- then it turned and smiled at me. It was glowing with light and seemed to fill my own head with light. I was aglow and excited and thought, "This must be the Christos"; but something within me, without sound, said, "No, this is you." I feel I will never be the same again and some day I may experience the "Promise".

A soul with no light will always come to know Light because there is so much assistance provided to each soul at all times.

The Light of God surrounds you,
The Love of God enfolds you,
The Power of God protects you,
The Presence of God watches over you;
Wherever you are, God is.

KNOW that all who live in the magnified Presence
are forever advancing towards the moment of
Great Realization
in their lives.
The Light that shines in the Silence,
in that space of Awakening,
is beyond the brilliance of even the greatest Sun.
It is the Light of your Heart.
and your Heart is the Morning Star.
O listen if you would,
for therein lies a teaching.

Notice that the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are the victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego -- your need to possess and control -- and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous -- large souled.

Prayer opens the heart. Each time we pray we are connecting with a greater source of energy and we are amplifying that energy. Our gratitude, thanksgiving, for even the smallest gift we have received, allows our heart to open. The more the heart opens, the larger our vision becomes. This prayer, this energy, links us with all the goodness on the planet.

We seat ourselves so that we are evenly spaced from one another and begin to meditate. In my own meditation, I see how I have tried to control a situation in which a friend wanted to participate -- a situation that was actually beyond my control. In retrospect, I recognize that the presence of my friend has been a blessing. In gratitude, I realize that I must always be ready to shift and adapt, for in rigid resistance, I might miss my greatest opportunities.

To learn to be grateful for each challenge, every heart, every tear, as well as for the unexpected joy and love you encounter, is a lesson of great growth. Every experience is a step closer to your eventual union with the Source of All Creation. Even a moment of expressing your gratitude for your own creation, your own eternal life each day brings you closer to the love and power within.

Each thing I have received, from Thee it came,
Each thing for which I hope, from Thy love it will come,
Each thing I enjoy, it is of Thy bounty,
Each thing I ask comes of Thy disposing.

In all things may we be grateful, our hearts open to joy.
O Blessed one, speak to us within our hearts;
let your Voice be heard.
As we listen and heed your Word, joy will be our song of thanks.
As you lead us into the Silence, we become friends with solitude;
With trust in You, our lives become simple, with assurance
and peace leaving no room for fear.
All that we have is gift from You, O Beloved,
all that we are is Yours as well.
May we come to see that all we give to others,
we give to ourselves and You.

The hieroglyphy for peace is a simple loaf of bread set on a reed mat. It implies nurturing, simplicity, contentment, and rest, a prayer of thankfulness before a meal, an offering made.

The heart is contented because it receives what it needs and its needs are simple: silence, prayer, nourishment, presence. Simplicity of the heart keeps our aims and purposes in life clear... In peace we contemplate our lives and concentrate our energies on the true desires of the heart aligned with God.

We learn that patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to live each moment, knowing that we will be attended to by God.

Now are come the days of brown leaves. They fall from the trees; they flutter on the ground. ... I hear them tell you of their borning days, when they did come into the world as leaves. ... Today, they were talking of the time before their borning days of the springtime. ... They told how they were a part of earth and air, before their tree-borning days. And now they are going back. They go back to the earth again. But they do not die.

In that moment of awareness, I had an epiphany, that the light we encounter on the road of death is our being in the act of coming home to itself. I understood that light is our natural state, but that we human beings must help each other as we move toward the shores of light. ...Being in the light is knowing we must get others into it. ...The light is where we belong. Everyone who is not in the light is looking forward to being there. So we leave the light to go and experience the need for light and thus come back to it anew.

The world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. ... If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.

I am not sure at what point I realized that the man whom I had seen as my all-powerful and invincible father not only wanted me as I am, but also needed me to stand by him through the long journey into his own death. My father needed my friendship. It still seems to me to be an astonishing gift of God's grace that in the last years of his life I was able to stand with him as his friend who was his adult child.

The only way to avoid death is not to be born in the first place. In death there is union with the Beloved. The real skill is to reach the secret of death before dying.

We prepare for death, or rather eternity, by consciously adjusting the focus of our life so that it is not upon our personality and the flowing world that spawns upon it, but instead upon our individuality and the Great Fullness with which we are one. This process of focusing our attention is called meditation. In meditation we die to the personality and are reborn as something much greater. That rebirth is not a sudden or one-time event, but is a gradual process in which we become ever more focused on who and what we really are behind the mask of personality ... the process of dying to death by being reborn to reality.

Naturally, most of us would like to die a peaceful death, but it is clear that we cannot hope to die peacefully if our lives have been full of violence, or if our minds have mostly been agitated by emotions like anger, attachment, or fear.  So if we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well: Hoping for a peaceful death, we must cultivate peace in our mind, and in our way of life.