October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us. Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times... What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.

~ from KITCHEN TABLE WISDOM by Rachel Naomi Remen
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

God – and humankind too – is a mystery, a living paradox of opposites:

"Most deeply hidden and most nearly present, always acting and always at rest, still gathering and never wanting, seeking although in need of nothing!"

I dive down deep as I can and I find no end.

~ Augustine in JOURNEY FROM PARADISE by Ralph Harper
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

It is not outer reality that silence reveals, but our own innerness. Silence is essentially a surrender to the holiness of the divine mystery – whether we use these words or not. An atheist, calming his or her spirit in the peace of silence, is irradiated by the same mystery, anonymous but transforming. We are to listen. To what? To silence.

~ from MEDITATIONS ON SILENCE by S. Wendy Becket
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

~ by Annie Dillard
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

Taking on the mystery is yielding to grace, letting go of all analyses, explanations, ideologies, self-images, images of God, agendas, and expectations. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the finitude of years, hallowing diminishments, and living into the solitude of our own integrity. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the pain of learning that there re no empires favored by the Holy One ... the grief of understanding that there are not theologies favored by the Holy One. Taking on the mystery is acknowledging that we cannot name the mystery, though we try, we cannot claim the mystery, though we do. The mystery names and claims us ...

~ from A TIME TO LIVE by Robert Raines
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

The sacred is plainly a mystery of consciousness – using the word MYSTERY to signify not a problem that can be intellectually solved, but a process of awakening and transformation that must be acted out in order to be experienced, and experienced if one is to make it one's own.

~ from THE SACRED by Francis Huxley
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)
It is the Beloved who is seeking us, calling to us, longing for us. We always think that we are the seeker, but the deeper mystery is that we are the called.
~ from THE CALL AND THE ECHO by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

We are a unity in our diversity
Jewels in a very large web
connected by "Mystery"

But "Mystery" the same for all
but called by different names

The name may be the limit
that tears the strands apart
of the web
connecting us in it.

~ from "Unity in Diversity" by Eleanore Milardo
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)
Simply put, God wants everything ... What a mystery! To want to loose all, willingly, and with each release to realize you have been increased and made into what you could nevr make of yourself regardless of all you may possess.What a mystery!
~ by Guy Finley with thanks to Chris Roberts
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

Spiritual disciplines are being renewed throughout the world. For some, the ultimate mystery of things is experienced in the depth of the inner self, for others in the human community, for still others in the earth process itself. Yet in each instance, the full sense of communion seems to be present.

~ by Thomas Berry
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

O Great Mystery
We give thanks for the natural world we see:
All the Creatures, Stones and Plants
Who show us how to be.
We learn their lessos seek their truths,
Return our loving praise,
We honor the peace they show us,
Which guides our human ways.
We ask that we may become like them,
Living in harmony,
And deep within our heart of hearts,
Know the Sacred Mystery. 

~ from PEACE PRAYERS by Jamie Sams
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

Dance was my way of praying, of listening, of celebrating, it wasmy way of being as beautiful as the life around me. Now I feel hideous, unloved, abandoned. I lie down and sob and I feel a screeching hunger for mil, for some essence to flow from the sky and reach down through my shattered mind and reconnect me to warmth and calm. And very gradually it happens. The life in the trees and grass and the warm rocks enters my body and joins me to them. One morning, I sit up and see the incandescent trees in silent communion with each other, immersed in love. This is the world, I think, the real world. Whatever happens to me, the world is still this luminous mystery.

~ from THE SUBTLE SELF by Judith Blackstone
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

If only we refuse to take our world for granted, we can detect something artful lurking at the heart of life, inviting us deeper into the world, allowing us to penetrate further and further into the Mystery of its creation, perhaps even promising us a new relation to everything we know.
 

~ from VLADIMER NABOKOV by Brian Boyd
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies.

~ Shakespeare
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

The revealed mystery of God is fathomless.

~ by Hans Ur von Balthasar
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October 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 9)

Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet ... as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.

~ from THE KNOWING HEART by Kabir Helminski
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was important Work to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did. Somebody was angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

~ from a Friend of Silence in Philippines
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
Do not forget that the value and interest of life is no so much to do conspicuous things as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.
~ Teilhard de Chardin
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)

Good work is really all about love's way

~ Fran Peavey
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)

Sandy and Ginny knew what they wanted to create for their neighborhood. They started with three goals: to make a safe place for everyone; to offer nourishing meals affordable to all people; to offer job training and work experience.

"We talked to a lot of people, but I was struck that one of our future customers said: 'Create a place where I can barter my labor instead of my soul.'"

 

~ from ORDINARY GRACE by Kathleen A. Brehony
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
Villagers in AFrica are interested not in accumulation but in a sense of fullness. Abundance means a sense of fullness, which cannot be measured by the yardstick of the material goods we possess or the amount of money in a bank account. Abundance, in that sense of fullness, has a power that takes us way from worry. It is the kind of feeling you get when you are in communion with the natural, in communion with the source. There is some sense in which the work,, or the love of work, is the love of this kind of abundance. It is the kind of fullness you get by being with other people. Most work done in the village is done collectively. The purpose is not so much the desire to get the job done but to raise enough energy for people to feel nourished by what they do. The nourishment does not come AFTER the job, it comes BEFORE the job and DURING the job. The nation that you should do something so that you get paid so that then you can nourish yourself disappears You are nourished first, and then the work flows out of your fullness.
~ from THE HEALING WISDOM OF AFRICA by Malidoma Some with thanks to Fredi Brown
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)

Rules for an icon painter: During work, pray in order to strengthen yourself physically and spiritually; avoid, above all, useless words, and keep silence.

~ from PRAYING WITH ICONS by Jim Forest
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)

May the work you do make your heart sing,
and my the vocation you choose be LOVE.

~ Anonymous
Anonymous work
September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)

God is absorbed in work, and hears
the spacious hum of bees, not the din,
and hears far-off
our screams. Perhaps
God listens for prayers in that wild solitude.
And hurries on with weaving:
till it's done, the garment woven,
our voices, clear under the familiar
blocked-out clamor of the task,
can't stop their
terrible beseeching. God
imagines it sifting through, at last, to music
in the astounded quietness, the loom idle,
the weaver at rest.

~ "The Task" by Denise Levertov
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
I have one longing only: to grasp what is hidden behind appearances... What is my work? ... to let the mind fall silent that I may hear the Invisible calling.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
True vocation joins self and service, as F. Buechner asserts when defining vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need."Buechner's definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins – not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created.
~ from LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK by Parker Palmer
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
Once God has become a living reality for us, we simply have to love others. We cannot do otherwise. And once we live in love, we are moved quite naturally and joyfully to serve others. God is love and if we live in union with God, we have the strength and longing to love others. Service is a spiritual activity, the natural fruit of love.
~ from WISDOM OF SUNDAR SINGH
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
A pair of long, black woolen stockings hung there, and in one of them a huge darn. A perfected circle of calmly woven thread, no bobble or tug, no tension, no rough knot. Only someone very special, stable, and peaceful could make that kind of darn. To me it was a work of art. To do the smallest thing so supremely well, it had to be done with Love.
~ from ON PILGRIMAGE by Jennifer Lash
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
Many a humble soul will be amazed to find that the seed it sowed in weakness, in the dust of daily life, has blossomed into immortal flowers under the eye of love.
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
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September 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 8)
Over many a Sabbath the lads showed me where the rabbit warrens were, and the places in the rocks along the coast where the plovers hid their eggs, to be looked at but never disturbed. For hardy lads they had a gentle touch with flowers, and the discovery of a tiny bloom hidden beneath the leaves of a larger plant would draw from them both a sudden intake of breath.In the same manner that we played, so too we worked, and we made of work a thing of joy, for even hard work shared is work made worthwhile, and when shared with those we love, it is work made holy. So, I believe, not because someone taught me with some words, but because, clear and simple, that was the way of it.
~ from DARK THE NIGHT, WILD THE SEA by Robert McAfee Brown
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
To nourish the soul means to become kinder, more compassionate, wiser, and more loving, often through the making of difficult choices that foster growth rather than safety. The nourishment and growth of the soul is very reason for human life. When we nourish the soul we nourish God, increasing the abundance of the life that we can see – our children, or society – and the levels of life we don't see at all. In a larger sense, soul is the substance of the universe, knowing itself and growing itself.
~ from HANDBOOK OF THE SOUL by Joan Borysenko
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life long and arduous quest after Truth and soul requires inward restfulness to attain its full height.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
In the center of Love's embrace is the circle of the soul and the body. For just as the Word of God penetrates all creation, so does the soul penetrate the whole body like wind flowing through a house or like a sower seeding fertile ground or like a mother soothing her crying babe. Yet all these wonder are held in the arms of Love an are linked in a delicate balance in a universe creted to be of service to humanity so men and women can work with it.
~ from SCARLET MUSIC: A Life of Hildegard of Bingen by Joan Ohanneson
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

It had never been my intention to discover something new. I wa simply forced to follow the call of a voice. Now I know; it was the voice of God I wanted to hear, the voice I divined as a child, of which I dreamt when I read in the Old Testament that it sounded not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but that it was a gentle whisper. The voice of God speaks but of the soul, the soul speaks but of life, and as he soul means life, God means life itself, the beginning and end of a gigantic current which flows in eternal movement, in time and space, beyond time and space, and beyond any judgment.

~ from ORPHEUS by Alfred Wolfsohn
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
I have come to understand soul as the unseen, oftimes disowned inner guardian of our lives, a force weaving together the threads of heart, mind, and spirit that fashions us into an integrated piece of work.
~ Susan C. McElroy
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
You know of the disease called sleeping sickness. There also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Itsmost dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take it as a warning: your soul suffers if you live superficially.
~ Albert Schweitzer
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

Faith lengthens the soul, charity widens it, hope gives it height.

~ Isaac of Stella
Isaac of Stella soul Buy on Amazon
July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.

~ Minquass tribe proverb
Anonymous soul
July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

The soul of the universe is never seen;
its voice alone is heard ...
It has a gentle voice like a woman,
a voice so fine and gentle that
even children cannot become afraid.
What it says is,
"Be not afraid of the universe."

~ an Alaskan adage or teaching
Anonymous soul
July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
In the school of adoration the soul learns why the approach to every other goal had left it restless.
~ Douglas Steere
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
To help my stay connected to my soul, I begin each day by spending an hour in nature. Every day I give gratitude; every day I meditate. One day a month I devote to silence and reflection. Usually I fast on this day; it's a whole day of being, and of listening to my inner guidance. There is no doing. I literally either walk in silence or sit insilence listening. These practices help open my creative fires to the mysteries of the soul.
~ from "Gateway to the Soul" by Angeles Arrien
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)
Since early times, the Holy Soul was known to the people of Israel as the Shekinah. She brought peace and harmony into the community, working into the "soul of the community." Shekinah also means "Divine Presence," and he most direct and immediate experience of the Holy Soul or the Shekinah is the presence of a sense of peace and harmony prevailing on the soul level – a kind of "overlighting" from the community of souls gathered together.
~ from THE MOST HOLY TRINOSOPHIA by Robert A. Powell
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

According to Celtic spiritual tradition, the soul shines all around the boy like a luminous cloud. When you are very open – appreciative and trusting – with another person, your two souls flow together. This deeply felt bond with another person means you have found an ANAM CARA or "soul friend." Your ANAM CARA always beholds your light and beauty, and accepts you for who you truly are.

~ from ANAM CARA by John O'Donohue
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

We allow loss of soul awareness at our own peril and that of humanity and planet Earth! We can only become authentic individuals by attending to our souls throughout our lives.

~ Anonymous
Anonymous soul
July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

What is this precious love and laughter
Budding in our hearts?
It is the glorious sound
Of a soul waking up!

~ Hafiz
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July-August 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 7)

If we want to support each other's inner lies, we must remember a simple truth. The human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard. If we want to see and hear a person's soul, there is another truth we must remember.The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.

~ from THE COURAGE TO TEACH by Parker Palmer
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June 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 6)

Birds inspire and uplift us with their carols... In the muslc of both birds and humans, beauty is "the wine which overflows." When the last lark has fallen silent, something holy will have vanished from the world. The chorus of life will be muted. The cathedral of the earth will have lost its choir.

~ from THE SOULS OF ANIMALS by Gary Kowalski
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June 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 6)

Music is a DISCIPLINED feeling, sound given form and pattern through number and rhythm – the single sound of the universe bringing consciousness through incarnation in music to the inner ear of the soul . As a woman, it is the masculine creative spirit within, who brings me the sound of the music of God – unlike man, who hears it through the numinous feminine within. God's music unites all.

~ from SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON by Helen Luke
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June 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 6)

Listen for the special music,
the song nobody else can sing
but you.

~ Denise Shekerjian
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June 2001 (Vol. XIV, No. 6)
I have spent my days
stringing and unstringing
my instrument
While the song I came to sing
remains unsung.
~ by Rabindranath Tagore
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