Small clouds inexpressibly beautiful and silent and eloquent, over the silent woodlands. What a celebration of light, quietness, and glory! This is my feast, sitting here in the straw!
Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s Life
Category: Spirituality
Bathed in the silence of God
Without the mystical, we are left without the full understanding or meaning that could exist. We can neither fully see, nor fully hear, the otherness of the divine without a fully developed sense for the mystical.
For the soul to grow beyond the verbal expressions of the mind, it must be bathed in the silence of God, wherein God speaks beyond words to reveal beauty to us.
Beyond every safe frontier
And some final thoughts on longing from John O’Donohue’s essay on fire.
This is the longing in all spirituality: to come in out of the winter of alienation, self-division and exile and into the hearth of warmth and at-one-ment.
… the fire of longing is what confers life. This longing brings one beyond every safe frontier. It is in the giving of oneself to the fire that ultimate transfiguration and renewal comes.
John O’Donohue, ‘Fire: At Home at the Hearth of Spirit’, in: The Four Elements: Reflections on Nature
Greeting the day
We greet the morning sun each day with our to-do lists, while the monk greets the sun with prayer and silence.
Lonni Collins Pratt with Daniel Homan, Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love
Achtsamkeit für die Sprache
Ich vermisse heute bei vielen Predigten und bei der Gestaltung von Gottesdiensten die Achtsamkeit für die Sprache. Da spürt man oft nicht mehr das Bemühen für die Schönheit.
(Anselm Grün, Schönheit: Eine neue Spiritualität der Lebensfreude)
Wie wahr!
Tsimtsum and the coming into being of the other
Henri Nouwen, in The Wounder Healer, quotes James Hillman, who talks about the Jewish mystical doctrine of Tsimtsum, noting that
God as omnipresent and omnipotent was everywhere. He filled the universe with his Being. How then could the creation come about? … God had to create by withdrawal; He created the not-Him, the other, by self-concentration … On the human level, withdrawal of myself aids the other to come into being.
Nouwen elaborates:
when we have found the anchor places for our lives in our own center, we can be free to let others enter into the space created for them and allow them to dance their own dance, sing their own song and speak their own language without fear. Then our presence is no longer threatening and demanding but inviting and liberating.
St Peter
Impulsive master of misunderstanding,
You comfort me with all your big mistakes;
Jumping the ship before you make the landing,
Placing the bet before you know the stakes.
I love the way you step out without knowing,
The way you sometimes speak before you think,
The way your broken faith is always growing,
The way he holds you even when you sink.
Born to a world that always tries to shame you,
Your shaky ego vulnerable to shame,
I love the way that Jesus chose to name you,
Before you knew how to deserve that name.
And in the end your Saviour let you prove
That each denial is undone by love.
From: Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year
Brief thoughts & quotes … 