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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.

Prayer is the human heart
what breath is to the body.

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.

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us. Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times... What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.

God – and humankind too – is a mystery, a living paradox of opposites:

"Most deeply hidden and most nearly present, always acting and always at rest, still gathering and never wanting, seeking although in need of nothing!"

I dive down deep as I can and I find no end.

It is not outer reality that silence reveals, but our own innerness. Silence is essentially a surrender to the holiness of the divine mystery – whether we use these words or not. An atheist, calming his or her spirit in the peace of silence, is irradiated by the same mystery, anonymous but transforming. We are to listen. To what? To silence.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

Taking on the mystery is yielding to grace, letting go of all analyses, explanations, ideologies, self-images, images of God, agendas, and expectations. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the finitude of years, hallowing diminishments, and living into the solitude of our own integrity. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the pain of learning that there re no empires favored by the Holy One ... the grief of understanding that there are not theologies favored by the Holy One. Taking on the mystery is acknowledging that we cannot name the mystery, though we try, we cannot claim the mystery, though we do. The mystery names and claims us ...