Just a tiny ledge of love is enough

Each and every moment when I'm aware and mindful presents me with a choice.  This choice is the great miracle of human dignity restored in Christ. I can choose each and every moment how I shall live, what I shall love, Who I shall worship. The lure of sin is great, but when the soul presents itself before God with even the hint of a desire to choose the good, God sends grace to carry us the rest of the way. Choose then to take your stand on that tiny toehold of love in your heart.  If a tiny ledge of love is all you have, the ledge is enough.

Take a stand there and cry out to God for help. Help will come swiftly to carry you into All you seek.

Time and the Divine encounter

Time is precious. Through awareness of our experience with time---that is, watching over our impulses that, unguarded, call us out of our heart's dwelling in real time---we taste of the life we would have known had we never sinned. Awareness of time is our vocation as the New Adam, the New Eve.

Fully aware of this present moment we stand in the presence of God in humility, love, and gratitude, desiring to live in yielded obedience rather than the slavery of self-rule.

A deep and interior freedom

I practice loving God alone---who alone satisfies, making every other thought as nothing. This is not rest, but leads to rest. It is in this practice that habits are formed, and from habits comes virtue---that inner freedom from all false loves to love the only thing that should be loved, God, in whom the relinquishment of all other things gives us Everything. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing calls this "forgetting." Julian of Norwich says that "we need to know the littleness of all created beings and set at nothing everything that is made," so we can love God "who is unmade."

I pray this way so that I may be so bound to God and not to myself and the lower loves.  I pray this way so that as Julian also says, there may be "no created things between my God and me"---not even a single thought to cloud my vision of God's glory or shade my heart from God's love.

Contemplation is not quietism

The path I follow in contemplation, the prayer of the heart, is not mere quietism. It is not transcendental meditation or emptying or relaxation. It certainly transcends. It does empty. And it may relax.

But it is active, in fact, it is warfare. It aims at the deepest from of asceticism---an interior renunciation.  It aims to watch rising thoughts like a fly-fisherman watches fish. I take hold of thoughts before they lure me away and pull them down instead, toward Christ in my heart. I draw them in and down, following the breath.

In the presence of Christ, they give up their pretensions; they're made nothing in comparison to the Almighty.

To dance with time

"All time is given to you, it shall be asked of you how you have spent it." St. Anselm Watch, then, for "sin is lurking at your door; it's desire is for you---you must master it" (Genesis 4). Prayer is the holding of the heart in time (eternal time, God's time)when the soul is buffeted and even tormented and mauled by the beasts who want to drag you into space. How intoxicated we are with space---filling it up with stuff, things; conquering it, taming it.

You are to be concerned with time. Embracing it. Loving it. But the beasts will draw you out of time and into space, space that's increasingly crowded by obligations, demands, and tasks that will always keep you living from a sense of deficit, scarcity. You will be led to believe you don't have enough time to fill up this space. But you have all the time in the world. You have an abundance of time. Time cannot really be spent, it is eternal.

Anselm, I know what you're getting at, but don't talk about spending time.

We get to dance with time, make love to time.  Prayer is this dance, the marriage bed of God.