Quotations
Jesus Christ is my monastery
Martin Laird
Christ is all and is in all Col. 3:11
Being ourselves until we are One is the relational paradox that is the heartbeat of the Universe. Mark Nepo
Justice is what love looks like in public
Cornell West
Cornell West
The holiest place on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.
Course of Miracles
Course of Miracles
Resurrection can only be received and affirmed and celebrated as the new action of God whose province it is to create new futures for people and let them be amazed in the midst of despair.
Walter Brueggemann
Distraction is married to discontent
Gaylon Ferguson
Gaylon Ferguson
In contemplation...the subjectivity of the contemplative becomes one with the subjectivity of God. William Shannon
I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'
Faith in Jesus Christ rests on two remarkable affirmations. Jesus Christ reveals to us the face of God, which is love. And Jesus Christ reveals to us the meaning of the human, which is love. This double revelation is enough. I do not need to know that it is the only true story on earth to affirm that it is worth giving my heart to.
Diane L. Eck
The transcendent God who creates all things is always everywhere present, relating to creation in loving, liberative, salvic ways. ..Incarnation bespeaks a different form of divine presence marked by an unimaginable intensity of intimacy, It is presence in the flesh...With the incarnation God's presence abides not only in and for the world, but from deep down to the point of identity as part of the world.
The doorway into the silent land is the wound. Silence lays bare this wound...Our wound and the wound of God are one wound.
Martin Laird
Silence is a language of vision.
Kathleen S.
Each life is like a page of scripture.
Arthur Colnaghi OSB
Jesus speaks of a power greater than karma...the power of karma can be reversed and dissolved at its' root by forgiveness. Laurence Freeman
Salvation is not a bridging of a gap, but an awakening to our actual essence.
Willigis Jager
Mastery must yield to mystery....The fundamental contribution of the contemplative traditions ...is their constant affirmation that mystery can be known without being solved.
Gerald May
There is no deep knowledge of God without a deep knowledge of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.
John Calvin
Pure love and prayer are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Merton
God is always self-giving;it is a question of removing the obstacles that make it difficult to receive this Self-Gift. This receptivity is what contemplative practice cultivates.
Martin Laird
The fruit of silence is prayer
The fruit of prayer is faith
The fruit of faith is love
and
The fruit of love is silence.
Mother Theresa
God is love, an intensity of desire to bring
us to the fullness of being which is our perfect happiness.
Ruth Burrows
The world is hungry not for busier people but bigger-hearted people.
Daniel Groody CSC
When interior silence is discovered, compassion flows.
Martin Laird
True solitude is participation in the solitariness of God- who is in all things.
Thomas Merton
The soul's center is God.
John of the Cross
We are required to 'do' less and 'be present' more.
Murchadh O' Madagain
Suffering is not intrinsic to holiness, suffering is intrinsic to life. And the saintly engage life and suffering in the present moment- just as it is.
Martin Laird
My only me is God.
Catherine of Genoa
Salvation is the recognition of our oneness with God.
Thomas Keating
The 'fall' is the fall from awareness-- from unitive consciousness to separation consciousness.
Martin Laird
With those who love God, all things work for the good.
Rom. 8:28
Do you seek God? Seek within yourself and ascend through yourself.
St. Augustine
If you have understood it, it is not God. St. Augustine
If you would understand a single grain of wheat,
you would die of wonder.
Martin Luther
We are in God. Thomas Keating
Awareness is the eye of silence.
Martin Laird
What used to be a hindrance now helps you most.
Meister Eckhart
Christ lives in me as my deepest self.
Raimon Panikkar
There is literally not a moment when I am not being given a choice between God and myself.
Ruth Burrows
Grace is the heartbeat of the universe. It is God bent over us in love. The life of faith is simply the free response to this love, directed toward us for every point of the universe.
Denis Edwards
What would be meant by a peace which is not like the kind the world gives? It is a peace....stronger than suffering. Not a peace without warfare, with warfare, beyond warfare. t is the peace of a soul that through love has come to dwell entirely in heaven and to share in heaven's own peace, regardless of anything earthly that can happen to it.
Charles de Foucauld
A faith shown to be living by its love, steadfast by its perseverance, patient by its endurance of delay, humble by its confession, strong by its confidence, reverent by its way of presenting petitions, and discerning with regard to the content- such a faith may be certain that in every place it will hear God saying: I do want to. St. Paschasius Radbertus
The only experience guaranteed by Jesus' summons is that of carrying the cross.
N. T. Wright
What we are asked to do at present is not so much to speak of Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him by feeling how he lives in us.
Thomas Merton (last recorded words)
Solitude is the furnace of transformation...It is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter - the struggle against the impulsiveness of the false self, and the encounter with the living God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.
Henri Nouwen
God meets us in those places in our lives that are most alienated from God.
Robert Mulholland
We are consumed by the Eucharist - when we say 'Amen' we say 'Amen' to who we are - Christ. St. Augustine
We become contemplatives when God discovers himself in us.
Thomas Merton
The spiritual thirst of Christ is a love-longing that lasts and always will until we are all together whole in him.
Julian of Norwich
Tradition is the living faith of the dead.
Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
Jaroslav Pelikan
Ritual is the repetitive enrichment of the symbols of that event which call the community into being so that event is present now with power.
It's not that the facts don't matter. It's just that they don't matter as much as the stories do, and stories can be true whether they happened or not....just listen to the story. Let it come to life inside of you, and then you decide on the basis of your tears or laughter whether the story is true. If you are in any doubt, it is always a good idea to watch other people who have listened to the story- just pay attention to how the story affects them over time. Does it make them more or less human? Does it open them up or shut them down? Does it increase their capacity for joy?
Barbara Brown Taylor
God is always giving himself, but we must grow to receive him.
Ruth Burrows
It is essential for the Christian faith that we know we have seen the face of God in the face of Jesus. It is not essential to believe that no one else has seen and experienced redemption in another time and place. Joseph Hough
The deeper the unity, the more pluralism a community can absorb. The variety of viewpoints and gifts are experienced not as threats to one's own practice and views, but as enrichment. Thomas Keating
Love is the funeral pyre
where the heart must lay
its' body.
Hafiz
You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.
R. M. Rilke
Alas for those who do not sing;
They die with their song still inside them.
Yom Kippur Service Prayer
Silence speaks for itself.
Brother Paul Quinn
Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest awhile.
Mark 6:31
The word 'rest' has a precise tradition in Christian spirituality...from the monks of the Egyptian desert...the 'rest' that comes from wanting what God wants and not being compulsively forced to do their own will, because their own will, along with everything else in their ego, has been sacrificed to God.
Thomas Keating
Mystery is not merely a way of saying that reason has not yet completed its victory. It is the goal where reason arrives when it attains its perfection by becoming love.
Karl Rahner
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
L. Wittgenstein
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
G.B. Shaw
You see persons and things not as they are, but as you are.
Anthony de Mello
Cardiognosis-- knowledge of the Heart.
Evagrius
We must read the Bible or we will not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are based upon the Bible. Jung
Perhaps everything that is terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love. Rilke
Enantiadromia - Greek
The ability of anything followed unthinkingly to turn into its exact opposite.
The presence of God is so deeply embedded within the universe and within the earth that to live in tune with the earth is to live in tune with the reign of God.
Cletis Wessels
The Osage Indians have adopted the Man on the Cross because they understood him. He is both CHASO--sky person- and HUNKAH--earth person. His footsteps are on the peyote altar and they are deep, like the footprints of one who jumped.
John Joseph Matthews
For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in it swift course was not half gone, your all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land... Wisdom 18:14-15
In Christ we are drawn to become what we already are.
David G. R. Keller
Self-realization in the true religious sense is then less and awareness of ourselves than it is an awareness of the God to whom we are drawn in the depths of our being. M. Basil Pennington
The spiritual journey is an awakening to the words of Christ at an ever- deepening level, which will transform our being.
Thomas Keating
How to Pray: I look at God; I look at you; and I keep looking at God.
Julian of Norwich
O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.
Ps. 34:8
Called or not, God is present.
Carl Jung
...through all my life the mystery of Christ continues its silent expression.
Laurence Freeman
In much speaking, thou shall not avoid sin.
Prov. 10:19
The more words we need, the greater our poverty.
Thomas Merton
I am a string in the concert of God's joy.
Jacob Boehm
The Gospel needs to keep its shocking effect. You can never claim to have fully understood the Gospel. It should always keep you on edge and never satisfied. Tony Walsh
Humbly welcome the Word...
James 1:21
Gratefulness (great fullness) is the full response of the human heart to the gratuitousness of all that is.
David Steindl-Rast
Gratitude is heaven itself.
William Blake
The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.
Henri Nouwen
He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when the heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.
You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
Bernard of Clairvaux
The world is pregnant with God.
Angela of Foligno
Angela of Foligno
The soul loves the body.
Meister Eckhart
I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'
Alasdair MacIntyre
At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
Toni Morrison
Shela (SHA-LU) Aramaic for prayer
to open oneself
to listen to
to open to The Divine Presence
to open oneself
to listen to
to open to The Divine Presence
Hope is not an appetite for this or that concocted future.
It is the present seeking itself, the present-
unlearning the past, agnostic of the future-
breathing, in its chains, like the sea.
Richard Shiffman/ HOPE excerpt
Diane L. Eck
We believe in a Jesus kind of Christ- a God who is going to the mat with humanity....If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/resurrecting path of getting there. If Christ is the source and the goal, then Jesus is the path for that source toward the goal of divine unity with all things. Richard Rohr
Only holiness will call people to listen now. And the work of holiness is not about perfection or niceness; it is about belonging, that sense of being in the Presence and through the quality of that belonging, the mild magnetic of implicating others in the Presence....this is not about a relationship with a distant God but about the realization that we are already within God.
John O'Donohue
Wisdom does not inspect, but beholds.
Thoreau
Be still and know that I am God
Ps. 46:10
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
John O'Donohue
Wisdom does not inspect, but beholds.
Thoreau
Be still and know that I am God
Ps. 46:10
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
Absolute attention is prayer
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
Somewhere between the minute particular and the essence lies the land of poetry
May Sarton
The transcendent God who creates all things is always everywhere present, relating to creation in loving, liberative, salvic ways. ..Incarnation bespeaks a different form of divine presence marked by an unimaginable intensity of intimacy, It is presence in the flesh...With the incarnation God's presence abides not only in and for the world, but from deep down to the point of identity as part of the world.
Elizabeth Johnson
If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love. Julian of Norwich
All creation teaches us some form of prayer.
Thomas Merton
The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.
Julian of Norwich
We have lost the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses.
James Hillman
As you are, so is the world.
Ramana Maharshi
Tell your people they must wake up their feelings. Their heart must arise from its sleep. It must rise and stand up. That is how you find the track to God.
Elders of the Kalahari Bushmen
If we pray 'in the Spirit', we are not certainly running away from the life, negating visible reality in order to 'see god.' For 'the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole earth.' Prayer doesn't blind us to the world, it transforms our vision of the world, makes us see it and all men in the light of God.
Thomas Merton
My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my being.
Catherine of Genoa
Acquire inward peace, and a multitude around you will find their salvation.
St. Seraphim
No seed ever sees the flower.
Zen saying
One doesn't become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not very popular.
Carl Jung
The wounds in Jesus' glorified body reminds us that our own wounds are much more than roadblocks on our way to God. The show us our own unique way to follow the suffering Christ, and they are destined to become glorifies in our resurrected life. Just as Jesus was identified by his wounds, so are we.
Henri Nouwen
The poet enters himself in order to create. The contemplative enters God in order to be created.
Thomas Merton
God works in us even as we rest in Him.
Peter of Celles
The contemplative life- resting even in the midst of activity.
Thomas Keating
The mystic does not say 'Look at what I can do' but rather, 'Look at what Love has done to me.'
James Finley
The yoke of Christ is the yoke of becoming conscious.
John Sanford
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you to the truth.
John 16:12-13a
The word 'shaman' means to see in the dark.
Miriam Greenspan
Between you and God there is no between.
Meister Eckhart
We embrace union with God not in terms of identification with God but as participation in God.
Justin Langille
In Christ we are drawn to become what we already are.
David. G.R.Keller
The fundamental goodness of human nature like the mystery of the Trinity, grace, and Incarnation, is an essential element of Christian faith...Our basic core of goodness is our true Self. Its' center of gravity is god. The acceptance of our basic goodness is a quantum leap in the spiritual journey...The basic core of goodness is capable of unlimited development, indeed of being transformed in Christ.
Thomas Keating
Everything God created is good.
1 Timothy 4:4
He who prays for his enemies can not be vengeful.
Evagrius
The more I speak, the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say.
Henri Nouwen
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
Thomas Merton
To know much and taste nothing- of what use is that?
Bonaventure
In prayer we discover what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there. We already have everything but we don't know it and don't experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.
Thomas Merton
The present moment is a gate-less gate opening to a pathless path.
Martin Laird.
Humility is the fruit of the bitter sweet experience of self-knowledge [gained in the dark night of sense]. It is the peaceful acknowledgement of our faults without the reaction of blame, shame, anger or discouragement. Self-recriminations are neurotic.
Thomas Keating
Fundamentalism is a treatment plan for anxiety.
James Hollis
The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved:the faith that one is loved by God. Thomas Merton
We are disciples of what we pay attention to.
Laurence Freeman
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
M. Proust
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out, and stood in the light, lashing her tail. Czeslaw Milosz
You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
Annie Dillard
Anyone or anything that doesn't make you feel alive is too small for you.
David Whyte
Love for the earth, and love for you, are having such a long conversation in my heart.
Mary Oliver
Thinking roams about
Meditation investigates
Contemplation wonders
Richard of St. Victor
In the center of one's nothingness one meets the Infintely Real.
Thomas Merton
If God's incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into his super luminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths....then we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.
Karl Rahner
The fact that most of us experience through most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition.
Martin Laird
from Christian Bobin:
Silence is the highest form of thought, and it is in developing in us this mute attention to the day, that we find our place in the absolute that surrounds us.
Grace does not rid us of our bumblings: it crowns them.
Holiness is so far from perfection as to be its polar opposite. Perfection is the spoilt little sister of death. Holiness is a potent taste for life as it goes- as a childlike capacity to rejoice in what is, without asking for anything else.
Beauty has the power to resurrect. Seeing and hearing is all it takes. It is distraction that keeps us from entering heaven while we live, only distraction.
If each of us enacted the deepest desires that God our Creator and Lord raises in our spirits, then in that moment the Reign of God would explode among us.
Joseph Tetlow SJ
The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God knowing that that goodness can reach right down to our lowest depths of need.
Julian of Norwich
Through his wounds we are healed.
Is. 53:5
All creation teaches us some form of prayer.
Thomas Merton
The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.
Julian of Norwich
We have lost the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses.
James Hillman
As you are, so is the world.
Ramana Maharshi
Tell your people they must wake up their feelings. Their heart must arise from its sleep. It must rise and stand up. That is how you find the track to God.
Elders of the Kalahari Bushmen
If we pray 'in the Spirit', we are not certainly running away from the life, negating visible reality in order to 'see god.' For 'the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole earth.' Prayer doesn't blind us to the world, it transforms our vision of the world, makes us see it and all men in the light of God.
Thomas Merton
My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my being.
Catherine of Genoa
Acquire inward peace, and a multitude around you will find their salvation.
St. Seraphim
No seed ever sees the flower.
Zen saying
One doesn't become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not very popular.
Carl Jung
The wounds in Jesus' glorified body reminds us that our own wounds are much more than roadblocks on our way to God. The show us our own unique way to follow the suffering Christ, and they are destined to become glorifies in our resurrected life. Just as Jesus was identified by his wounds, so are we.
Henri Nouwen
The poet enters himself in order to create. The contemplative enters God in order to be created.
Thomas Merton
God works in us even as we rest in Him.
Peter of Celles
The contemplative life- resting even in the midst of activity.
Thomas Keating
The mystic does not say 'Look at what I can do' but rather, 'Look at what Love has done to me.'
James Finley
The yoke of Christ is the yoke of becoming conscious.John Sanford
I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you to the truth.
John 16:12-13a
The word 'shaman' means to see in the dark.
Miriam Greenspan
Between you and God there is no between.
Meister Eckhart
We embrace union with God not in terms of identification with God but as participation in God.
Justin Langille
In Christ we are drawn to become what we already are.
David. G.R.Keller
The fundamental goodness of human nature like the mystery of the Trinity, grace, and Incarnation, is an essential element of Christian faith...Our basic core of goodness is our true Self. Its' center of gravity is god. The acceptance of our basic goodness is a quantum leap in the spiritual journey...The basic core of goodness is capable of unlimited development, indeed of being transformed in Christ.
Thomas Keating
Everything God created is good.
1 Timothy 4:4
He who prays for his enemies can not be vengeful.
Evagrius
The more I speak, the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say.
Henri Nouwen
Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
Thomas Merton
To know much and taste nothing- of what use is that?Bonaventure
In prayer we discover what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there. We already have everything but we don't know it and don't experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.
Thomas Merton
The present moment is a gate-less gate opening to a pathless path.
Martin Laird.
Humility is the fruit of the bitter sweet experience of self-knowledge [gained in the dark night of sense]. It is the peaceful acknowledgement of our faults without the reaction of blame, shame, anger or discouragement. Self-recriminations are neurotic.
Thomas Keating
Fundamentalism is a treatment plan for anxiety.
James Hollis
The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved:the faith that one is loved by God. Thomas Merton
We are disciples of what we pay attention to.
Laurence Freeman
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
M. Proust
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out, and stood in the light, lashing her tail. Czeslaw Milosz
You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
Annie Dillard
Anyone or anything that doesn't make you feel alive is too small for you.
David Whyte
Love for the earth, and love for you, are having such a long conversation in my heart.
Mary Oliver
Thinking roams about
Meditation investigates
Contemplation wonders
Richard of St. Victor
In the center of one's nothingness one meets the Infintely Real.
Thomas Merton
If God's incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into his super luminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths....then we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.
Karl Rahner
The fact that most of us experience through most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition.
Martin Laird
from Christian Bobin:
Silence is the highest form of thought, and it is in developing in us this mute attention to the day, that we find our place in the absolute that surrounds us.
Grace does not rid us of our bumblings: it crowns them.
Holiness is so far from perfection as to be its polar opposite. Perfection is the spoilt little sister of death. Holiness is a potent taste for life as it goes- as a childlike capacity to rejoice in what is, without asking for anything else.
Beauty has the power to resurrect. Seeing and hearing is all it takes. It is distraction that keeps us from entering heaven while we live, only distraction.
If each of us enacted the deepest desires that God our Creator and Lord raises in our spirits, then in that moment the Reign of God would explode among us.
Joseph Tetlow SJ
The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God knowing that that goodness can reach right down to our lowest depths of need.
Julian of Norwich
Through his wounds we are healed.
Is. 53:5
The doorway into the silent land is the wound. Silence lays bare this wound...Our wound and the wound of God are one wound.
Martin Laird
Silence is a language of vision.
Kathleen S.
Each life is like a page of scripture.
Arthur Colnaghi OSB
Jesus speaks of a power greater than karma...the power of karma can be reversed and dissolved at its' root by forgiveness. Laurence Freeman
Salvation is not a bridging of a gap, but an awakening to our actual essence.
Willigis Jager
Mastery must yield to mystery....The fundamental contribution of the contemplative traditions ...is their constant affirmation that mystery can be known without being solved.
Gerald May
There is no deep knowledge of God without a deep knowledge of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.
John Calvin
Pure love and prayer are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Merton
God is always self-giving;it is a question of removing the obstacles that make it difficult to receive this Self-Gift. This receptivity is what contemplative practice cultivates.
Martin Laird
My heart was deafened by the din of my mind.
St. Augustine
In Christ we are drawn to become what we already are.
David G. R. Keller
Now it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.
Gal. 2:20
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. Thomas Merton
St. Augustine
In Christ we are drawn to become what we already are.
David G. R. Keller
Now it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.
Gal. 2:20
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. Thomas Merton
The fruit of silence is prayer
The fruit of prayer is faith
The fruit of faith is love
and
The fruit of love is silence.
Mother Theresa
God is love, an intensity of desire to bring
us to the fullness of being which is our perfect happiness.
Ruth Burrows
The world is hungry not for busier people but bigger-hearted people.
Daniel Groody CSC
When interior silence is discovered, compassion flows.
Martin Laird
True solitude is participation in the solitariness of God- who is in all things.
Thomas Merton
The soul's center is God.
John of the Cross
We are required to 'do' less and 'be present' more.
Murchadh O' Madagain
The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and god's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge, and one love.
Meister Eckhart
Be careful if you are thinking of becoming friends with the Holy Spirit, because He is going to ask you to die. Thomas Merton
All of creation holds its' breath, listening within me,
because, to hear you, I keep silent.
R.M. Rilke
What you can grasp gives you knowledge-what grasps you makes you wise.
Bernard of Clairvaux
The noblest prayer is when he who prays is inwardly transformed into what he kneels before.
Angelus Silesius
Prayer must be understood as a state of being, not just a particular activity.
Ruth Burrows
What, do you wish to know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For Love. Julian of Norwich
Meister Eckhart
Be careful if you are thinking of becoming friends with the Holy Spirit, because He is going to ask you to die. Thomas Merton
All of creation holds its' breath, listening within me,
because, to hear you, I keep silent.
R.M. Rilke
What you can grasp gives you knowledge-what grasps you makes you wise.
Bernard of Clairvaux
The noblest prayer is when he who prays is inwardly transformed into what he kneels before.
Angelus Silesius
Prayer must be understood as a state of being, not just a particular activity.
Ruth Burrows
What, do you wish to know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For Love. Julian of Norwich
Suffering is not intrinsic to holiness, suffering is intrinsic to life. And the saintly engage life and suffering in the present moment- just as it is.
Martin Laird
My only me is God.
Catherine of Genoa
Salvation is the recognition of our oneness with God.
Thomas Keating
The 'fall' is the fall from awareness-- from unitive consciousness to separation consciousness.
Martin Laird
With those who love God, all things work for the good.
Rom. 8:28
Do you seek God? Seek within yourself and ascend through yourself.
St. Augustine
If you have understood it, it is not God. St. Augustine
If you would understand a single grain of wheat,
you would die of wonder.
Martin Luther
We are in God. Thomas Keating
If we serve Silence, we are also serving the earth.
Robert Sardello
Emptiness is not a lack- it is a superabundance of Presence.
Martin Laird
The meaning of your solitude is the measure or your capacity for communion.
Henri Nouwen
Everything has being through the love of God.
Julian of Norwich
The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words will be useless unless they come from within. Words which do not give the Light of Christ increase the darkness. Mother Theresa
Robert Sardello
Emptiness is not a lack- it is a superabundance of Presence.
Martin Laird
The meaning of your solitude is the measure or your capacity for communion.
Henri Nouwen
Everything has being through the love of God.
Julian of Norwich
The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words will be useless unless they come from within. Words which do not give the Light of Christ increase the darkness. Mother Theresa
Awareness is the eye of silence.
Martin Laird
What used to be a hindrance now helps you most.
Meister Eckhart
Christ lives in me as my deepest self.
Raimon Panikkar
There is literally not a moment when I am not being given a choice between God and myself.
Ruth Burrows
Grace is the heartbeat of the universe. It is God bent over us in love. The life of faith is simply the free response to this love, directed toward us for every point of the universe.
Denis Edwards
Charles de Foucauld
A faith shown to be living by its love, steadfast by its perseverance, patient by its endurance of delay, humble by its confession, strong by its confidence, reverent by its way of presenting petitions, and discerning with regard to the content- such a faith may be certain that in every place it will hear God saying: I do want to. St. Paschasius Radbertus
The only experience guaranteed by Jesus' summons is that of carrying the cross.
N. T. Wright
What we are asked to do at present is not so much to speak of Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him by feeling how he lives in us.
Thomas Merton (last recorded words)
Solitude is the furnace of transformation...It is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter - the struggle against the impulsiveness of the false self, and the encounter with the living God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.
Henri Nouwen
God meets us in those places in our lives that are most alienated from God.
Robert Mulholland
We become contemplatives when God discovers himself in us.
Thomas Merton
The spiritual thirst of Christ is a love-longing that lasts and always will until we are all together whole in him.
Julian of Norwich
Tradition is the living faith of the dead.
Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
Jaroslav Pelikan
Ritual is the repetitive enrichment of the symbols of that event which call the community into being so that event is present now with power.
Urban T. Holmes
It's not that the facts don't matter. It's just that they don't matter as much as the stories do, and stories can be true whether they happened or not....just listen to the story. Let it come to life inside of you, and then you decide on the basis of your tears or laughter whether the story is true. If you are in any doubt, it is always a good idea to watch other people who have listened to the story- just pay attention to how the story affects them over time. Does it make them more or less human? Does it open them up or shut them down? Does it increase their capacity for joy?
Barbara Brown Taylor
God is always giving himself, but we must grow to receive him.
Ruth Burrows
It is essential for the Christian faith that we know we have seen the face of God in the face of Jesus. It is not essential to believe that no one else has seen and experienced redemption in another time and place. Joseph Hough
Love is the funeral pyre
where the heart must lay
its' body.
Hafiz
You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.
R. M. Rilke
Alas for those who do not sing;
They die with their song still inside them.
Yom Kippur Service Prayer
Silence speaks for itself.
Brother Paul Quinn
Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest awhile.
Mark 6:31
The word 'rest' has a precise tradition in Christian spirituality...from the monks of the Egyptian desert...the 'rest' that comes from wanting what God wants and not being compulsively forced to do their own will, because their own will, along with everything else in their ego, has been sacrificed to God.
Thomas Keating
Mystery is not merely a way of saying that reason has not yet completed its victory. It is the goal where reason arrives when it attains its perfection by becoming love.
Karl Rahner
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
L. Wittgenstein
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
G.B. Shaw
You see persons and things not as they are, but as you are.
Anthony de Mello
Cardiognosis-- knowledge of the Heart.
Evagrius
We must read the Bible or we will not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are based upon the Bible. Jung
Perhaps everything that is terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love. Rilke
Enantiadromia - Greek
The ability of anything followed unthinkingly to turn into its exact opposite.
The presence of God is so deeply embedded within the universe and within the earth that to live in tune with the earth is to live in tune with the reign of God.
Cletis Wessels
The Osage Indians have adopted the Man on the Cross because they understood him. He is both CHASO--sky person- and HUNKAH--earth person. His footsteps are on the peyote altar and they are deep, like the footprints of one who jumped.
John Joseph Matthews
Being right is a kind of violence.
Arthur Poulin
The Christian life-and especially the contemplative life - is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. And these discoveries are sometimes most profitable when you find Him in something you had tended to overlook and even despise.
Thomas Merton
The divine plan is to transform human nature into the divine, not by giving it some special role or exceptional powers, but by enabling it to live ordinary lives with extraordinary love.
Thomas Keating
I thank you for the wonder of my being.
Ps. 138:14
The soul's center is God.
John of the Cross
My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart
In prayer we discover what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there...Everything has been given to us in Christ.
Thomas Merton
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.
Is. 26:3
Only when we stand emptied, stand impoverished before God, can we receive what only empty hands can receive. This is the poverty of spirit in which Jesus blesses us. (Matt.5:3)
Eugene Peterson
The contemplative life is the steady gaze of the soul upon the God who loves us. Richard J. Foster
The contemplative life is an 'intimate sharing between friends.'
Teresa of Avila
Sin is the unwillingness to trust that what God wants is our deepest happiness. Ignatius of Loyola
Saints do not see things others so not see. On the contrary, they see just what everyone else sees- but they see it differently.
Jonathan Edwards
The more I speak, the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say. Henri Nouwen
The highest degree of love is love for ourselves for God's sake.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells within you? 1 Cor. 3:16
I am still but still moving.
T. S. Eliot
Arthur Poulin
The Christian life-and especially the contemplative life - is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. And these discoveries are sometimes most profitable when you find Him in something you had tended to overlook and even despise.
Thomas Merton
The divine plan is to transform human nature into the divine, not by giving it some special role or exceptional powers, but by enabling it to live ordinary lives with extraordinary love.
Thomas Keating
I thank you for the wonder of my being.
Ps. 138:14
The soul's center is God.
John of the Cross
My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart
Silence is above all a quality of the heart that can stay with us even in conversation with others. It is a kind of portable cell that we carry with us wherever we go.
Henri Nouwen
HESYCHIA or 'pray always', means come to rest.
....the core wisdom of the Trinity, in the innermost ground, divine being is communal, self-communicating. And because our true self is rooted in that divine ground, it can never be found in pure emptiness...but only through a self-emptying love.
Cynthia Bourgeault.
Nothing in you that has not died will be raised from the dead.
C.S. Lewis
'If you can understand it', says St. Augustine, 'then it is not God.' This radical humility (and humor) before the ineffable mystery of God is the foundation of the Christian tradition.
Laurence Freeman
The glory of God is a human fully alive.
St. Irenaeus
Not contemplative prayer but the contemplative state is the purpose of our practices; not experiences, however exotic or reassuring, but the permanent and abiding awareness of God that comes through the mysterious restructuring of consciousness.
Thomas KeatingIn prayer we discover what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there...Everything has been given to us in Christ.
Thomas Merton
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.
Is. 26:3
Only when we stand emptied, stand impoverished before God, can we receive what only empty hands can receive. This is the poverty of spirit in which Jesus blesses us. (Matt.5:3)
Eugene Peterson
The contemplative life is the steady gaze of the soul upon the God who loves us. Richard J. Foster
The contemplative life is an 'intimate sharing between friends.'
Teresa of Avila
Sin is the unwillingness to trust that what God wants is our deepest happiness. Ignatius of Loyola
Saints do not see things others so not see. On the contrary, they see just what everyone else sees- but they see it differently.
Jonathan Edwards
The more I speak, the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say. Henri Nouwen
The highest degree of love is love for ourselves for God's sake.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells within you? 1 Cor. 3:16
I am still but still moving.
T. S. Eliot
Pure prayer begins at the threshold of silence. It says nothing, asks for nothing. It is a kind of listening. The deeper the listening, the less we listen for, until the silence itself becomes the very voice of God.
Stephen Mitchell
...I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.
Hosea 2:16
This is the question: does your heart yearn for one thing alone?
Rilke
The fulness of love brings the maximum of rest at the same time that it makes possible the maximum of action.
Thomas Keating
Stephen Mitchell
...I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.
Hosea 2:16
This is the question: does your heart yearn for one thing alone?
Rilke
The fulness of love brings the maximum of rest at the same time that it makes possible the maximum of action.
Thomas Keating
For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in it swift course was not half gone, your all-powerful Word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, into the midst of the land... Wisdom 18:14-15
In Christ we are drawn to become what we already are.
David G. R. Keller
Self-realization in the true religious sense is then less and awareness of ourselves than it is an awareness of the God to whom we are drawn in the depths of our being. M. Basil Pennington
The spiritual journey is an awakening to the words of Christ at an ever- deepening level, which will transform our being.
Thomas Keating
How to Pray: I look at God; I look at you; and I keep looking at God.
Julian of Norwich
O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.
Ps. 34:8
Called or not, God is present.
Carl Jung
...through all my life the mystery of Christ continues its silent expression.
Laurence Freeman
In much speaking, thou shall not avoid sin.
Prov. 10:19
The more words we need, the greater our poverty.
Thomas Merton
I am a string in the concert of God's joy.
Jacob Boehm
The Gospel needs to keep its shocking effect. You can never claim to have fully understood the Gospel. It should always keep you on edge and never satisfied. Tony Walsh
Humbly welcome the Word...
James 1:21
Gratefulness (great fullness) is the full response of the human heart to the gratuitousness of all that is.
David Steindl-Rast
Gratitude is heaven itself.
William Blake
The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.
Henri Nouwen
He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when the heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.
Jeremiah 17:8
