Let yourself be silently drawn,
by the strong pull
of what you really love.
Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it's not the love of other humans that will make us happy. What will make us happy is the love we feel for every human, the love we feel for God, for all creation. When the love comes from someone else, we can love it and it's nice; but when we feel our own love, it's the best thing that can happen to us. We live in heave, we live in bliss. Open your heart and love unconditionally — not because you want love in return, and not because you want to control someone. That is false love. When you love with no conditions you transcend the dream of fear and become aligned with divine spirit, the love of God, which is love coming from you. That love is LIFE, and just like the sun, it is shining all the time.
Properly understood and applied, prayer is the most potent instrument of action.
The seed of prayer is sown in heaven.
It pushes its stem toward the earth
and comes to grow there.
It produces an abundance of fruit.
Then, as it becomes seed once more,
it thruts its way back to heaven.
As we grow in the way of prayer, we begin to know that true prayer is an aware openness to the working of Love, that we may play our part in transmitting the divine love to all whom we meet in the daily round. Prayer is universal in scope, for God has no favorites. The way of communicative silence is the most effective way of knowing God and serving our brothers and sisters... I have little doubt that we will appreciate the silence when the body is dead and the soul passes forth into new surroundings for fresh adventures.
Even when we bring the most difficult situations into prayer, the pain and resistance are in the situations, not in the prayer itself, as prayer is always true to itself. It discloses its own nature — that of a door a passageway to the Great Life of God. Prayer does not hold dismay, even though whatever we pray about may, for prayer move us off the place where we find ourselves and ushers us along — closer, at least — to the place we long to be.
Prayer becomes a connection to those we do not know. As we intervene for people all over the world, we become mysteriously linked with them. So, when we enter the sacred space of prayer, a crowded, jostling, colorful procession accompanies us.
Prayer is action you take in order to realize yourself fully with your neighbor and with God. It is the fulfillment of the great commandment to love God and neighbor. It opens the gate to heaven; heaven is the complete recognition of your potential to be who you really are, uniting you in pain and joy with God and with the whole world. Embracing your own alienation and brokenness with honesty and openness is the foundation of prayer; prayer can be choked off by self-will. Prayer is anything you think, say, do, or feel that opens you up and out to love.
Prayer and meditation are as necessary for the life of the spirit as fresh air, food, and sunlight are for the body. If we think of prayer as talking to God, with or without words, our own or those of others, then we can think of meditation as listening to God — an attitude of open, silent receptiveness.
Prayer gives joy to the spirit, peace to the heart. I speak of prayer, not words. It is the longing for God, too deep for words.
Beloved, You love us and call us by name.
Awaken in us the desire to know
your presence in our hearts.
Fill us with you Spirit of Truth
opening us to your Love
enabling us to trust in your Word.
Strengthen our faith so that each day
our lives may radiate the Love
and the Light of your Life in us.
Amen.
At times God seems to give us stones impossible to digest. In these moments think of the pearl oyster: it retains the accidental grain of sand within itself for a long time, constantly bathing in it with its secretions. In due time a magnificent pearl is created. In like manner the animosities and antipathies that make their way into our hearts are seemingly indigestible pebbles. However, if we keep them wrapped in prayer, they will become pearls of love. Prayer provokes this miracle of love. Indeed, what appears to be indigestible can become real nourishment for prayer.
To the extent that you are able to acknowledge and accept the grace and guidance that come your way, your life will become more rewarding. Seeing life symbolically means always looking for the larger and deeper meaning in any event. That view transcends the physical plane, and especially at moments of stress and confrontation, allows you to rise above whatever is happening and see it in the context of your entire life.
By the grace You grant me of silence without loneliness, give me the right to plead, to clamor, for all who are imprisoned in a loneliness without silence!
Special grace comes with drama and flair. We are rescued, singled out in a momentous act of boldness. BUT common grace falls upon the just and unjust alike. It strikes us as simply too ... ordinary.
I was caught suddenly by a sweep of reverence, by a sensation that made me want to sink to my knees. For somehow I knew that I had stumbled upon an epiphany, a strange gracing of my darkness... That was the moment the knowledge descended into my heart and I understood. REALLY understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping — they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times as beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.
God may bless you with grace, no matter where you are, or what the conditions of your life. But we cannot demand that grace come to us. One of the most beautiful things about grace is that it is unearned. Like anything beautiful, if we chase it we are left only with a sense that we have missed it. Always remember: GRACE HAPPENS.
Grace has come to us in unexpected ways in the midst of life. We have known healing, courage, restored love — salvation. From these blessings of grace we see how to live in resistance to violence; we see how to live in love and in truth without denying bitter realities. We have felt a fire in the heart of things, intimated in moments of surprise, a power which guards, judges, and continually recreates life. We have sensed what Wordsworth called "a presence that disturbs me with joy ... something far more deeply interfused." This presence, felt as mystery and offered as faithfulness to one another, sustains and heals life. It calls for justice.
My human attempt to live the gentle life is my promise of cooperation with the grace of gentility once it touches my lífe. My attempt to grow in gentility may tempt me to forget that its outcome is only provisional, a shadow of thíngs to come — the real thing being the divine gentleness of soul that is a pure gift of the Holy.
Grace is the continuous overflowing of the Divine Essence, which is coming to all.
Peace is love resting in order to be renewed. The renewal takes place in the inner silence. In the desert we see things as they are. We are face to face with reality. The silence we observe externally does then become also the inner silence when the miracles of grace take place. Here we are stripped of the outward garments hiding our true selves. Here we can embrace the awfulness of our human condition and the awesomeness of the offered gift of grace. We are in touch at last with our reality.
After the service was over, I realized in reviewing my life that I no longer had anything to forgive — no grudges, resentments, memories of pain suffered at the hands of others. When I told my director, she said, "Molly, do you realize what a great grace you've been given?" Well, no, I hadn't, not until she said that, and only as I have reflected on it since. It is a great grace. And it's one that I'm not going to poke around in to try to scare up some lost memory or past injury in order to test its reality.
Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry, an umbilical spot of grace where we were first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues Peace. To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. We each live in the midst of ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
I know nothing,
except what everyone knows...
if there when Grace dances,
I must dance!
The return to a sense of community where people hold all things as sacred is an affirmation about the grace within human nature. We are meant to grace one another: to be sources of grace and healers of grace. So grace is an abundance, not a scarcity. Grace comes through our art: the art of living, the art of our language, the art of our relationships, the art of our forgiving.
Yahya deeply trusted in God's forgiveness. The preacher from Rayystands amazed and overwhelmed before the mystery of divine love: is it not the greatest miracle of grace that God, the ever rich who needs nothing, should love? How then, should we, who are so much in need of Love, not love God? He sums up his whole feeling in one short prayer: "Forgive me, for I belong to Thee."
The first Americans believe profoundly in silence — the sign of perfect equilibrium. Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind and spirit. Those who preserve their selfhood are ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence — not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree. If you ask, "What is silence?" They will answer, "It is the Great Mystery! The holy silence is Great spirit's voice!" If you ask, "What are the fruits of silence?"" you would be told, "They are self-control, true courage or endurance, patience, dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character."
The fruit of silence is known only to those with experience. There is gradually born within us in and of our silence itself, something that will draw us on to still greater silence. God leads us into solitude to speak to our heart. Let our hearts be a living altar from which there constantly ascends before God pure prayer, with which all our acts should be imbued.
Were You not to grant me the grace
during the night-watchers
of drinking the silence,
of diving into it,
of being soaked in it,
How should I know
that inner silence,
without which
one can hear
neither others
nor You?
We are each surrounded by an enormous silence that can be a blessing and a help to us, a silence in which the skein of reality is knitted and unraveled to be knit again, in which the perspective of work can be enlarged and enriched. Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom.
We need silence to be able to touch souls. The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. God is a friend of silence. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God will say through us.
Silence brings us far beyond soundlessness, it quiets our senses and spirit and tunes our heart for a deep and delicate listening. For, silence is a primal language which speaks and listens from the heart. It is not the only language through which we communicate with God, but it is a necessary second language since the knowledge of God is received in divine silence. Like all other languages, silence is easily forgotten without practice and discipline.
Dear friend, do you not see
That whatever we look upon here
Is but reflection, merely a shadow,
Of what is invisible to our earthly eyes?
Dear friend, do you not know
That the jarring noises of the world
Are but an echo distorted
Of triumphant harmonies?
Dear friend, do you not sense
That in all the world is only
What one heart says to another
In silent greeting?
To be able to enter daily into the silence
without worries, fears, doubts,
without plans of any sort,
to say no more than, "I AM HERE"
and to feel it so,
simply and truly — is an act of faith,
an exercise in openness, attentiveness, devotion.
It will shape your soul to meet
the Friend of your heart.
There are billows far out on the ocean
that never break on the beach.
There are thoughts in the temple of silence
too great for our hearts to speak.
SILENCE, the pure objective awareness of being, is our "way without words." It opens us up to our deepest spiritual awareness. Silence is fertile soil. What we receive from this rich ground depends on what we put into it... seeds that we ourselves plant in our inmost silence. People who remain unconscious about their own spiritual life seem like irresponsible farmers: they devalue the land entrusted to their care.
Silence before God has deep significance: in the quietness of the soul the individual sinks into the central fire of communion... In the silent act of breathing and in the unspoken dialogue of the soul with God, solitary as these are, deep communion can be given.
The essence of silence is self-emptiness, docility, receptivity, detachment, desire, listening, communion. Every act of silence is a little Advent. A Luigi Giussaní sums it up, "Silence is not merely keeping quiet, but it is the attitude of one who lives standing before a 'You' who is presenting, entreating a 'you' who is present." Teresa of Avila refers to contemplative prayer as the "prayer of quiet." Such prayerful silence enhances our ability and eagerness to listen to our Beloved. In this silence, the one in love remains perfectly content just to behold the Beloved, gazing in a state of holy and tranquil abiding. Silence speaks to silence.
May your silence be in
holy communion with the
Indwelling Guest
of your heart...
Silence blossoms in prayer.