A Morning Prayer: O Beloved of my heart, give me grace today to recognize the stirrings of your Spirit within my soul and to listen most attentively to all that You have to say to me. Let not the noises of the world so confuse me, that I cannot hear your Voice. Help me not to deceive myself as to the meaning of your Word; and so let me in all things surrender myself into your hands, through the grace of Christ's Love. Amen.
Real love is always difficult, as the German poet Rilke said, because "it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another, it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances." Eventually, love forces us to turn within. In the Symposium, his meditation on love, Plato called love a child of fullness and emptiness, suggesting that there is a kind of desolation built into every love. There comes a moment in the progress of most loves when lovers feel isolated and unfulfilled, because they have discovered that they cannot find real and enduring meaning by reaching outside themselves, clinging to their lover. . . They may see that it is only by daring to open to the silence at the center of themselves that they can begin to feel the presence of the One whom they have been searching for all along.