spring

There has to be enough communication so that silence can be a grace. That kind of silence demands a deeper love, and until that much love is developed, there is no point in pretending that the love is there when it isn't. The justification of silence in our life is that we love one another to be silent together ... In the depths of community life, we realize the grace of being silent together, but we don't arrive at this by excluding others or treating them as objects. It happens gradually as we learn to love ... The need is for a true silence which is alive and which carries a loving presence.

What we are called to is conscious harmony with the whole of earthly evolution in the dissemination of Love. In its very essence spiritual knowledge will be changed into Love ... The exterior knowledge of the universe will be interiorised in us. Love is Wisdom reborn from the Self. Love will be manifested as a natural force. This is the secret of all future evolution.

A message was brought to me that a young woman who was dying had asked that I come visit her. She was fevered and emaciated; at first glance, a forbidding sight. Then I noticed her eyes -- huge and glowing, so incredibly beautiful I was entranced by them. All my embarrassment disappeared; all my searching about in my mind for some appropriate sanctimony became unnecessary. "What beautiful eyes!" I heard myself saying to her sister. She agreed saying that her sister had always had beautiful, glowing eyes. A silence fell upon us, and we were all three caught up in a wonderful joy. I knew, of course, what it was -- God's love enfolding us like lights from heaven.

My arms are open. Come my Beloved
And rest upon my heart. It beats for You
And sings in joyous welcome. What am I
Except your resting place and your repose?

Your rest is mine. Without You I am lost
In senseless wanderings that have no end,
No goal, no meaning, on a road that goes
In twisted byways down to nothingness.

Come now, my Love and save me from despair.
The Way, the Truth, the Life are with me then.
The journey is forgotten in the joy
Of endless quiet and your kiss of peace.

If we "detach ourselves" from creatures such as human values, charisms, goods, if we do not use them in a domineering way, these creatures remain free. Our liberation therefore constitutes the liberation of creatures. Human energies and values, once liberated from abuse, can now enter into the realm of love. Entering into the sphere of love, both human beings and creatures remain within the process of DIVINIZATION, because God is Love.

The day will come when, after harnessing space,
the winds, the tides, and gravitation,
we shall harness for God the energies of love.
And on that day,
for the second time in the history of the world,
we shall have discovered fire.

Our love should not be just words and talk; it must be true love, which shows itself in action.

Our lives are a story, dear friends, a pilgrimage in which, hopefully, we grow to spiritual maturity, where we experience inner peace and joy, serenity, in trustfulness, in self-forgetting to self-transcendence. We are invited to surrender to the Holy Mystery together -- in loving communion with one another allowing the Spirit to make us one ... As long as we journey, as long as we are pilgrims and shaping our stories, we cherish the silence at the end of our activity and in the midst of our prayer, where the Holy One is present to be reverenced in mystery and loved in truth.

Only my footsteps in the snow,
Only the glow of my fire,
Only a choir of wind to sing the benediction.
But I feast on memories
In a holy place.
It has been so long since I have heard my own voice
It startles me
When I say the grace.
May all things lost, apart, alone
Find some small shelter of their own.

A secret sympathy unites a great community. They recognize one another by a sign, by a look, by the magnetic atmosphere that each one emanates; by their silences more than by their words. Like the children of Light, they have the desire to know and to understand, to love and to believe. The countenances of the greatest among them are veiled by a strange melancholy; for the tragedy of the universe weighs heavily upon their hearts. They feel themselves responsible for it, as portions of the earthly providence that watches over human destiny. But through this veil there shines like an aureole of light the inward joy of those who behold Divinity. In the silence they are conscious of being united to all living creatures by an invisible thread.