Dear Friends ~ The year after my first child was born could have been called A Crash Course in the Contemplative Life. Overnight my daily landscape shifted from the external and the social, to the internal and the domestic. My driving need for productivity and efficiency made no sense in a newborn's routine. I faced rhythmic but unscheduled days with swaths of quiet time. A part of me panicked without the markers of purpose and meaning I had always used to define myself, but the new pulse of our home and the simple yet powerful needs of my baby created a steady familiarity with silence.
Home, at its very best, is a space of welcome and acceptance. Maya Angelou once wrote, "The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned". For some of us, this is an actual place: a house or a landscape. Other times home can be the people and communities that provide the sort of reflection — knowing and being known — that draws us further into ourselves in order that the whole world around us can become a place where we truly live. ~ Joy
So often, we forget how to pray. We forget that there must be a time when we are silent so we can hear what God wants to say to us. Yes, my friends, we must pray, the prayer of two people in love with each other who cease to talk. Their silence speaks. This is the kind of prayer that the poustinia will teach you. Resting in God's love, you will understand the unity God wishes for you. Then as a pilgrim, you will go forth and shout and sing about this to all peoples.
Two people in love! When you are in love with God you will understand that God loved you first. You will enter into a deep and mysterious silence and in that silence become one with the Absolute. Your oneness with God will overflow to all your brothers and sisters.
My friends, this is the kind of prayer we need today. If you pray like this you will be overshadowed by the wings of a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit. On those wings your prayer of silence will be lifted into the hands of the Woman Wrapped in Silence, and she will lay it at the feet of the Most Holy Trinity. The answer today to the salvation of the world lies in prayer.