One elder said to another: "Why do the Wise have no more words to give?" The elder replied: "Because the disciples no longer listen."
Awaken your heart
When cultivating the spiritual life, don't focus first on "how?" But "how" is generally the first question people ask me. It's not ultimate. How inevitably follows why or what. Get why or what right and you'll get to how. So, focus instead on the disposition of your heart---that is, why you seek God, and what the experience is like.
Here's Theresa of Lisieux:
"Sanctity does not consist in this or that practice; it consists in a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in God's arms, teaches us our weakness, and inspires us with an almost presumptuous trust in his fatherly goodness."
It's that that'll carry your where you need to go. What's more, you can rest yourself humbly and little in God's arms whether your arguing a case before a jury, teaching kindergarteners, balancing your checkbook, or walking in a meadow.
Awaken your heart and all of life is prayer; daily life becomes sacred.
Stories of young, urban Christian meditators
Every human heart yearns for God; we are restless vagabonds upon the earth until we stop in our tracks and behold the light shining all around and within us. Here and now. Not somewhere else. To experience God in the midst of daily life—whether changing diapers, arguing a case before a jury, painting a wall, teaching third graders, or walking in the woods. To burn with a holy and playful fire. To live intentional, happy, and compassionate lives in our turbulent world. This is what we’re made for and this is the spiritual life. Through prayer, meditation, and contemplation, the dawn comes; we kindle a fire upon the hearth of our hearts.
But most of us are hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated. We want to pray, but we don’t really know how to pray; and few of us have someone to show us the way.
Here are the stories of young, urban Christians who are recovering our historic spirituality, coming alive to who they are in Christ, and who are living lives of meaningful involvement in our world:
Where to find God
A life of prayer that awakens to the essence of the spiritual life---happiness, inner peace, and the most meaningful kind of exterior action in daily life---awakens to the presence of the Beloved within. St. Teresa of Avila heard Christ speak these words: "Teresa, buscate en mi, buscame en ti" ("Seek for yourself in me, seek for me in yourself").
Where do you seek God? Here in the midst of your daily life, in this moment.
And how? By awakening to what's within you--the shadows and the radiance.
Prayer, then, is not a pious exercise divorced from daily life. Nor are you to wander here and there in search for God. Prayer is life, and life is prayer. God is near as the beating of your heart, close as your next breath.
Here's God's whisper to Teresa . . . and to you:
Soul, you must seek yourself in Me And Me you must seek in yourself. . . . . You were created for love Beautiful, gracious, and thus In my heart painted, Should you love yourself, O my beloved, Soul, you must seek yourself in Me. . . . . But if perhaps you should not know Where you may find Me Do not go hither and thither, But, if you should wish to find Me, Me you must seek in yourself.
Translated by Raimon Panikkar in Christophany: The Fullness of Man, 2004: 27-28
Holiness is done bodily
The holiness of daily life; the sacredness of this place, this moment, this body of yours; practices that open you to see and embrace the presence of God here, now.
That's what this site is about.
In her book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, Episcopal priest and college professor, Barbara Brown Taylor, summons us to that life and gives guidance for embracing it. I love the way she calls to us with the voice of Holy Wisdom (Proverbs 1.20-21):
"What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily human experience of human life on earth.
In a world of too much information about almost everything, bodily practices can provide great relief. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger---these activities require no extensive commentary or lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. . . .
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life. . . .
So welcome to your priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life. The good news is that you have everything you need to begin."