Warm greetings to all Friends of Silence this month of Valentine love, celebrated so commercially, and the beginning of Lent -- the journey to the Passion of Christ, celebrated in the hermitage of each hear where Love abides. While Valentine's Day invites us to express love and affection to special people in our lives, Lent calls us to reflect, pray and respond to Love that lives in the suffering world. One cannot be a contemplative and be spared the Cross ... the cries of the poor, the anguish of injustice and oppression, the agonies of those afflicted by war, disease, famine, disasters, the raping of our mother earth ... One only has to read the daily news to encounter over and over again the Cross.
"YHWH."It is the Name that by tradition we are forbidden to pronounce. Free yourself, I thought. Pronounce it. With no vowels, it came out: "Yyyyhhhhwwwwhhh." It sounded like breath. God's Name: the breath of life! No words, just the whispering, murmuring sound of a deep-drawn breath. For years I took delight in this discovery It hanged the way I prayed.Yet the hart of what had moved me I still had not discovered. I did not know it was my mother's breath I yearned for. For my mother to breathe easy once again, to draw once more a deep and even breath – that would be God for me. For each of us I realized, the deepest Name of God arises from the depths of our own life.