“This skill of observation and discernment, which the ancients call ‘vigilance,’ has three elements. First, turn around and meet the afflictive emotion with stillness. Without a dedicated practice this won’t be possible. Second, allow fear to be present. Third, let go of the commentary on the fear. This third element is the most challenging.”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. NY: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 104.
“The student who fears God earnestly seeks his will in the holy scriptures. Holiness makes him gentle, so that he does not revel in controversy; a knowledge of languages protects him from uncertainty over unfamiliar words or phrases, and a knowledge of certain essential things protects him from ignorance of the significance and detail of what is used by way of imagery. Thus equipped, and with the assistance of reliable texts derived from the manuscripts with careful attention to the need for emendation, he should approach the task of analysing and resolving the ambiguities of scriptures.”
St Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching Book 3, paragraph 1. Translated by R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), page 68.
Augustine thought it important for students (especially students of Holy Scripture) to have ready access to good quality texts. This is really a foreshadowing of the Renaissance humanists’ call to return to the sources (ad fontes).
“In L’Humble Présence, Maurice Zundel said that ‘silence is the only thing that reveals the depths of life.’ The great works of God are the fruit of silence. God alone is witness of them and, along with him, those who see from within, who keep silence and live in the presence of the silent Word, like the Virgin Mary.”
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017. Thought 216; page 113.
Zundel, by the way, was a Swiss Roman Catholic theologian, and friend of Pope Paul VI. He died in 1975.
“You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to ‘believe’ or ‘trust’ or ‘hold on.’ They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real–which you cannot possibly know yet.”
Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), page xxvii.
There were so, so many places along the Appalachian Trail which I’d read about for decades and had very clear pictures of in my mind that turned out–when I finally got there–to be nothing at all like I’d pictured them. The inner journey of the spiritual life has been surprising me like that. Heaven will no doubt turn out the same way.
“To sum up, in prayer there is the danger of falling into one of two opposite extremes. The first is ‘mythologizing’ (or making into an idol) the external forms, when prayer is reduced to the mechanical following of a rule or a method of praying. The second is the rejection of and allergic reaction toward all forms of prayer and asceticism. Those fall into this sad situation who do not know how to combine the external forms with sincerity of heart.”
Okumura, Augustine Ichiro. Awakening to Prayer. Translated by Theresa Kazue Hiraki and Albert Masaru Yamato. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1994), p. 52.
As in so very much, the middle way is the way of wisdom. In prayer it is best neither to reject formalized liturgical prayer, nor to avoid all extemporaneous and personalized prayer. Those are the head and heart respectively of prayer life. The golden mean brings together the tried and true traditional forms of prayer with the simple and sincere sighs of the heart.
“Therefore, be slow to speak and slow to go to those places where people speak, because in many words the spirit is poured out like water; by your amiability to all, purchase the right to frequent only a few whose society is profitable; avoid, even with these, the excessive familiarity which drags one down and away from one’s purpose; do not run after news that occupies the mind to no purpose; do not busy yourself with the sayings and doings of the world, that is with such as have no moral or intellectual bearing; avoid useless comings and goings which waste hours and fill the mind with wandering thoughts. These are the conditions of that sacred thing, quiet recollection.”
Sertillanges, Antonin G., O.P. The Intellectual Life: its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 47.
“As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows Himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958); (pbk ed 1999), p. 97.
“We can study endless maps of the pathways into the silent land. But the map is not the territory. To discover the actual land of silence requires not information but the silence of God that is the very ground of the mind and that causes us to seek in the first place.”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), page 76.
“The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.”
Merton, Thomas. “A Christian Looks at Zen.” (1967) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), p. 346.
‘I don’t understand Zen; and neither do you’ is about as foolproof a statement as I can make.
“Praise God we do not have hearts of stone or spirits of iron either. I do not wish evil on anyone, and no Christian, especially, is supposed to desire the wrath of God for anyone, not even for the Turks or the Jews or his enemy, indeed, not even for the cardinals and the pope.”
Luther, Martin. “To the Saxon Princes” (1545) Luther’s Works Vol. 43. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), page 262.
“Not even”! Late in his life Martin Luther made this declaration that all of us should be able to sign on with: don’t wish evil, don’t wish God’s wrath, on anyone. He had in mind at that particular moment Muslims, Jews, and Catholics – all of whom were his opponents in one way or another. (And why didn’t the Anabaptists or the Reformed make his list?)
Whom would he list today? More importantly, who would make your list of opponents? And most importantly, would you also not wish them evil? Can you love your enemies instead?
Pathology: the Study of a Path 