Silence

The best way to experience God is to stop talking. The praying saints testify that silence is the language of God. So does the Bibble. The prophet Habbakuk said, "The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth stand silent before him" (Habbakuk 2.20). When Elijah the prophet was seeking God on the mountain, we're told that God came to him not in a might wind, not in a mighty shaking of the earth, not in flames of fire, but in the "sound of sheer silence" (1 Kings 19.12). Silence and stillness and simplicity create the environment for unmediated encounter with the Holy.

Jim's a friend who's learned this truth. An active person, engaged in upper corporate management, competent, and hungry for God, he's learned to cultivate a contemplative posture in the midst of a very busy life. He spends time each day in silence before God. Not asking God for anything. Not reading. His only effort is to still his thoughts, and clear the internal clutter for just a few minutes.

Grinning, he once told me: "Silence is so loud."

Intention: Today, I'll practice a moment or more of silence . . . in simple stillness before God. It won't come easily. I get that. But I crave what can come to me only when I'm open, receptive, quiet.

Prayer

There isn't a person on the planet who doesn't long for the Beloved's touch. Everyone wants to pray, and everyone can pray. The trouble is, prayer's been so highjacked by religious people and especially by serious religious people that many of us don't want what we think prayer is, or don't think we can do what prayer requires. That's a terrible tragedy.

God is not a remote deity. God is not angry. God doesn't belong to a particular race or tribe or nation. The God revealed in Jesus is with us, for us, in us.

This means God is as near to you as the beating heart within you, as close as your next breath. Prayer, then, is as natural as breathing. The purest prayer is simply an awareness of the presence of God within and all around you.

Intention: Today, I will pause from time to time, take note of my breath, feel the beating of my heart, and sense the God who is within and all around me.

Interiority

Where is Christ? Where is the One in whom "all things in heaven and on earth were created" (Colossians 1.16)? Yes, up and out, "reconciling all things" (Colossians 1.17).

But also down and in, "holding all things together" (Colossians 1.17).

"Christ lives in me," wrote St Paul (Galatians 2.20).

Bernard of Clairvaux testified to an experience I want for you:

"I confess to you I have many times received the visits of the Word. I could not perceive the exact moment of his arrival. He did not enter by the senses, but whence did he come? Perhaps he did not enter at all, for he who enters comes from without. But I found him closer to me that I to myself" (Sermons on the Song of Songs).

Intention: Today, I will cradle the Creator of the Cosmos within my heart. I will trust that the Author of Life is in me--closer to me than I am to myself, holding me and all things together.

Believe it or not, the greatest moment of your life is the one you're now living

Whether you’re one who’s had to start over completely, or you’re a person who vacations or retreats periodically to keep your wits about you and keep yourself whole, at some point your respite must end and you’ll have to plunge yourself back into the routine of living here and now. To live well, and to live in attunement with God who is with you here and now, you’ll need to get over your wistful longing to be elsewhere else. If you don’t, you’ll stay stuck in the past, you’ll get lured into the future, and you’ll never live in the only place life can be lived—here, now.

The greatest moment of your life is the one you’re now living, but you’ll never taste it so long as you’re wistfully looking elsewhere for it to appear.

Prayer brings together what we too often separate

Prayer brings together what we in our ignorance too often separate. Prayer that follows the path of the embodiment of God joins together Divinity and humanity, spirit and matter, sacred and secular, mystical encounter with God and walking with a friend. Anyone whose praying perpetuates some sanitary separation between all these things isn’t walking the same path God-in-Christ has walked.

With every step the Beloved takes, there’s a deeper penetration of the Eternal into the temporal, and there’s a fuller incorporation of the temporal into the Eternal. That’s why we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Heaven and earth are one in Christ; Divinity permeating and pervading not only our humanity, but all creation as well.