fall

Death is but a return
to your original Source.

The death of those whom we love and who love us opens up the possibility of a new, more radical communion, a new intimacy, a new belonging to each other. If love is stronger than death, then death has the potential to deepen and strengthen the bonds of love.

It is only when we have died that our spirits can completely reveal themselves. The spirit of love, once freed from our mortal bodies. will blow where it will, even when few will hear its coming and going.

It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm,
a happy and auspicious bird of calm.

Ideally, friendships lead us into deeper communion with each other; those we love mirror the divine reality and so draw us closer to the One they reflect. In our humanness, however, we can forget that the friend is only a reflection of God and instead invest ultimate meaning in the relationship.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.

God acts upon us inescapably through the people
who befriend, touch and influence our lives.

Silence is the property, the contemplative quality, the fruit of faith. Interior, mystical silence is a silence which stems from the intensity of loving faith ... the interior result of a heart that loves intensely. The presence in our hearts of a secret to be kept brings about a density which is interior silence. Communication of secrets is the sign which manifests and proves the friendship and total trust of a friend.

Thou hast made me known to friends
whom I knew not;

Thou hast given me seats in homes
not my own.

Thou hast brought the distant near and
made brothers and sisters of strangers.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibility not born until they arrive, and it is
only by this meeting a new world is born

A friend is someone who abides. Waits.