Quotations

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon in long slow-motion movements of immense majesty there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more that a moment to fully realize this is the Earth -- our home.

The thirst for God, the desire for unitive knowledge, is not something foreign to our nature. This desire is already in the human heart; the only reason we fail to perceive it is because it is usually covered up with petty worries and egotistical ambitions. Once these are removed, the true desire, buried in the deepest recesses of the human mind, will shine forth of itself and, like a flame, will leap toward heaven, which is its true Home.

Through the cycles and seasons of our lives' as we continue to grow in awareness, we begin to feel more at home in the world. We begin to appreciate and accept who we are... We move from periods of joyful expansion into a dark night of the soul. We seem to reap the harvest of the sustained practice of attention and compassion and come to know ourselves in a new and more forgiving light, only to forget and return to what we thought were old, discarded ways. We suffer and we experience great delight. Yet deep within is a place of understanding, and to find this place is to come home.

Why do I forget You, abandon You?
You who are wholeness,
You who are home, always now, always present,
giving what every cell in me yearns for--
to collapse into Your warm breath of Life;
defenses drop, naked I be,
cherished solely for my nakedness,
my void, my forgetfulness.

Silence pregnant with all sounds,
I come back, prodigal that I am--
bruised, tired, wired,
To be undone again by Your embrace.

I am now an emergency physician and the medical director of a busy trauma center in western Colorado. To this day I shake my head in wonder when I look back upon the series of events that has driven me inexorably to this point. I see now that it all began the night when my life was a certain and violent death. And I also see that I have been shepherded to this place in my life for a reason. Now I speak with angels all the time.

The angels tongues are pure praise. Fire is also praise, the flickering flames are praise. Voice is praise, hearing is praise. All these images of praise are images of movement: fire moves, wind moves, tongues move, breath moves, hearing moves. In this praise there is a reverse movement toward God, perhaps mirroring. Energy moves out from God through the angels, and this movement back toward God in the form of praise is vibratory, dynamic, and meaningful.

Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action ... we reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he or she is free from the experience of hostility; she or he is a poet and most like an angel.

The angels can know us more intimately and love us when we sing, and they are not asking that we sound like the Philharmonic. They ask us simply to sing because we are harmonic. We are symphonic and in these ways we can connect with the angelic world. I think and feel that the angels wait for us at every given moment. If we alternate song and silence, consciously, with burning attention, every rounded tone carves out the possibility to bridge heaven and earth, to live the material half of the angel.

A legend told by the Venerable Bede says that the poet Caedmon was once completely mute. It was a custom in his village to spend evenings taking turns reciting poetry. On these occasions, Caedmon, unable to speak, would steal away to nearby hills to escape. One evening while walking alone, an angel appeared and urged him to sing. Miraculously, he began to sing and went on the become a famous poet.

Angels do different things. Some of them wipe your tears.

I walk in a cloud of angels
I move encircled by light and glowing faces...
stricken by music too sublime to bear.

As they talked together of The Way, the obstacles, the people, the signs ... you felt the great importance of the physicality of the quest. All of them stressed the power of silence: the need to be alone and find oneself in the silence. Moving alone, with silence as the single companion, seems a most profound means to register the natural balance of the world without, and world within.

The purpose of silence is to unite the world of things with the world of spirit and thus give the fairest life in all the world to body, mind, and soul.

True silence is a key to the immense and flaming heart of God. It is the beginning of a divine courtship that will end only in the immense, creative, fruitful, loving silence of final union with the Beloved... This silence, then, will break forth in a charity that overflows in the service of the neighbor without counting the cost. Availability will become delightsome and easy, for in each person the soul will see the face of love. Hospitality will e deep and real, for a silent heart is a loving heart, and a loving heart is a hospice to the world.

That which saves society is not that which can be seen upon the surface of things. It is not the power of industry, of war, of genius, of letter or arts. It is what touches its depths in a silence called the silence of good things. -- From a NY Times interview

When the word weds silence,
It becomes a prayer

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief or bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face us with the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Silence is also speech.

SILENCE is the strength and pace of the interior life.

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.

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.

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 ...