Posted on by Kurt Bodling

maturing from chatty to silent

"The beginner’s dryness in prayer is actually God’s grace and invitation to simpler prayer. John of the Cross offers some signs that the beginner is called to a simpler form of prayer: discursive meditation becomes hard and wearisome; our interior and exterior images of God no longer inspire devotion; we find pleasure in being alone and feel the attraction to wait with ‘loving awareness of God,’ without any particular meditation and inner peace, rest and quietness.

"In light of John of the Cross’s signs, we must never become a slave to any prayer technique and allow it to get in the way of our relationship with God. …

“As in any other relationship, as we grow and become more and more comfortable with God, we become more and more comfortable with silence. The silence is not empty or dead in any way whatsoever; it is a silence pregnant with a loving history between lover and beloved. And so we should always follow the silence whenever God’s grace offers the invitation.”

Haase, Albert. Coming Home to Your True Self: Leaving the Emptiness of False Attractions. Foreword by M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2008, pp. 158-159.

Comment: to quote another theologian, “this is most certainly true.”

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the word most people are afraid of

"We increase and deepen our participation in the life of the Body by the activity of our minds and wills, illuminated and guided by the Holy Ghost. We must therefore keep growing in our knowledge and love of God and in our love for other men. The power of good operative habits must take ever greater and greater hold upon us. The Truth we believe in must work itself more and more fully into the very substance of our lives until our whole existence is nothing but vision and love.

“What this means in practice is summed up by one word that most men are afraid of: asceticism.”

Merton, Thomas. “The White Pebble.” (1950) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, pp. 9-10.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

birth into maturity

“There is a time for warmth in the collective myth. But there is also a time to be born. He who is spiritually ‘born’ as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and the ‘satisfy’ them.”

Merton, Thomas. “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 221.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

diminishment is growth

from a prayer within the text: “When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more my mind); when the ill that is to diminish or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at the last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive in the hands of the great unknown energies that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fiber of my being to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Divine Milieu. Translated by Siôn Cowell. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012, pp. 50-51.