Rob Des Cotes

Contemplate the truth of these passages; read them slowly, meditatively, allowing them to arouse the heart to prayer. Let them simply remind you of your heart’s chief desire–to be always close to God.

“My soul finds rest and peace in God alone.”
Psalm 62:1

Letter from Taize, Brother Roger, 2003.

The Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts and whispers constantly to each one of us, “Surrender yourself to God’s will, in all simplicity.”

“A desire that calls out to God is already a prayer. If you want to pray ceaselessly, then never stop desiring.” St. Augustine

“Great simplicity of heart sustains contemplative prayer.”

Simplicity is the source of joy. It enables us to surrender ourselves to God, to allow ourselves to be led to him.

God, who remains invisible, does not necessarily communicate with us by means of human words. God speaks above all by silent intuitions.

So let us not use a great many words when we pray, but let us take time to pray in the silence of our heart.

Singing prayer with others allows the desire for God to well up in us and helps us enter into a contemplative prayer.

Thy Will Be Done, by St. Francis de Sales, Sophia Press, Manchester, NH, 1995

Souls differ more widely from each other than do human faces. But however different souls might be, all of them ultimately have the same vocation to glorify God by their holiness.

Those who are good people walk in the way of God; but the devout run, and when they are very devout, they fly.

Whoever is not fully resigned to God, whether he goes here or there, he will never have rest.

As your spirit looks elsewhere than where you are, it will never apply itself rightly to profiting from where you are.

Let us be who we are, and let us be it well, so that we can do honour to the Master whose work we are.

We cannot require from ourselves what is not in ourselves.

All we do has its true value from our conformity with the will of God. Never shall our heart live, save in Him and for Him.

Let us withdraw our minds into our heart, and bring it to its duty of loving God most solely.

Be attentive to make yourself every day more pure of heart. This purity consists in estimating and weighing all things in the balance of the will of God.

When you come to Him, speak to Him if you can. If not, stay there. Be seen, and care for nothing else.

Remain near God in this gentle and quiet attention of heart and in the sweet slumber of His holy will, for all this is agreeable to Him.

Above all, three little virtues are the most pleasing to God sweetness of heart, poverty of spirit, and simplicity of life.

There is no better way to perfect the spiritual life than always to begin again.

It is a very true thing that the company of well-regulated souls is extremely useful to us to keep our own soul well-regulated.

It is necessary before all things to obtain tranquility; it is the mother of contentment. The opportunities of practicing it are daily.

As I pray, I perceive deep within a certain sweetness, tranquility, and a certain gentle repose of my spirit in divine Providence, which spreads abroad in my heart a great contentment, even in its pains.

If we had nothing else but God, would it not be enough?

If you keep Jesus’ company, you will learn His disposition.

Let us always be moving; however slowly we advance, we will make plenty of way.

The highest point of humility is not only to know one’s abjection, but to love it.

It is a good thing to aspire in a general way to the highest perfect of the Christian life, but we do need to know its nature in detail, except insofar as it concerns our improvement and advancement in our daily growth of Spirit.

Cast yourself into His arms like a little child who, in order to grow, eats from day to day what his father gives to him, confident that his father will give to him in proportion to what he needs and is able to eat.

Wish not to do all, but only something; and without doubt you will do much.

Your heart is God’s; love happily in being so well-accommodated.

You must form clearly in yourself the idea of eternity.

Whoever thinks well on this troubles himself little about what happens in these three or four moments of mortal life.

To advance well we must apply ourselves to make good way in the road nearest to us, and to be prepared to always do the first day’s journey again.

We must not busy ourselves with wanting to do the last, but remember that we are to do and continually work out the first.

In order to become fervent in prayer, desire very much to be so, and willingly read the praises of prayer that are given in many books because the appetite for food makes us very pleased to eat it.

The truer way is not to examine whether your heart pleases Him, but whether His heart pleases you.

When we have lost our discipline, let us arise in peace and tranquility, knot again the thread of resolution, and then continue our work.

We must not break the strings nor throw up the lute when we find a discord; we must bend our ear to find where the disorder comes from, and then gently tighten or relax the string as required.

We must hate our faults, but with a tranquil and quiet hate, not with an angry and restless hate; and so we must have patience when we see them, and draw from them the profit of a holy abasement of ourselves.

We always want God to speak to us in the small wind, gentle and fresh, as He did with Elijah, but sometimes God wishes to speak to us in the thorns and the bush, as He did with Moses.

“In patience you shall possess your souls.” To possess fully our souls is the effect of patience, made more perfect as it is less mixed with disquiet and eagerness.

Grow familiar with your burden, as if you and it were always to live together. You will find that when you are no longer thinking of deliverance, God will think of it.

While a temptation displeases you there is nothing to fear; for it displeases you because you do not will it.

We must do all by love, and nothing by force; we must love obedience rather than fear disobedience.

We need only to keep ourselves well in the two virtues of humility and charity; one the lowest, and the other the highest. All the other virtues are attached to these.

It is the great good of our souls to be ‘for God,’ and the greatest good to be only ‘for God.’

Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr, Crossroad Publ. NY, 1999.

You do not resolve the mystery of God in your head or in your actions. It is resolved in you, when you agree to bear in yourself the mystery of God.

Most of us fabricate all kinds of religious trappings to avoid taking up our own inglorious, mundane, and ever-present cross.

We collapse back into the Truth only when we are naked and free.

We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.

Prayer, in the early stages, is often a profound experience of the core of who we are.

Healthy religion and true contemplation lead to calmly held boundaries, which don’t need to be constantly defended.

True contemplatives are paradoxically risk-takers and reformists, precisely because they have no private agendas, jobs or securities to maintain. Their security and identity are founded in God, not in being right, being paid by a church, or looking for promotion in people’s eyes. These people alone can move beyond self-interest and fear to do God’s necessary work.

People who have learned to live from their center in God know which boundaries are worth maintaining and which can be surrendered.
We have no real access to who we really are except in God.

Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.

We must keep in mind that the purpose of the exploration of prayer is not to get anywhere. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God.

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, enjoying the Presence.

The contemplative is not just aware of the Presence of God, but trusts, allows and delights in it.

We must always be ready to see anew.

What blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don’t need to know. We have to pray for the grace of a beginner’s mind.

Spirituality is about seeing. It’s not about earning or achieving. Once you see, the rest follows. You don’t need to push the river, because you are in it.

If the great mystery is indeed the Great Mystery, it will lead us into paradox, into darkness, and into journeys that never cease.� That is the journey that prayer is all about.

The only true perfection available to us is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

The beginner’s mind is a posture of eagerness, of spiritual hunger. It knows it needs something. That’s why the poor have a head start. They can’t resort to an instant fix: entertainment, a trip somewhere, aspirin. They remain empty whether they want to or not.

To acknowledge oneself as a beginner is to be open to transformation.

Religious energy is found in the questions, seldom in the answers. Answers are the way out, but questions are the way in.. When we look at the questions we are looking at the opening to transformation.

The last experience of God is frequently the greatest obstacle to the next experience of God.

What is, is the great teacher.

Feeling God’s presence is simply a matter of awareness.

When we live out of ego, we impose our demands on reality. But when we live in God’s presence, we await reality’s demands on us.

Who I really am. That’s a place of utter simplicity. Perhaps we don’t want to go back there often precisely because it’s so simple. It feels so unadorned. There’s nothing to congratulate myself for. I can’t prove any worth, much less superiority. There, I am naked and poor and I feel like nothing.

The desert is where we go to be voluntarily understimulated. No feedback. No new data.

We don’t know just how ephemeral our thoughts and feelings are until we take the time to sit and observe. That’s the early stages of contemplation; where you begin to notice how this feeling grabs you, how that identity grabs you, how that hurt grabs you, and even so, you want to identify with it because in some way it gives you some ground to stand on.

True contemplation looks for the place of perfect simplicity. You can’t stay there, but if you know this simplicity once, it is enough for a whole lifetime. You know your life is radically okay. That you are a child of God. You are in union. There is nothing to prove, nothing to attain. Everything is already there.

All we really need to be with God is surrender and gratitude. Our job is simply to thank God that we are a part of it all.

Prayer lives in a spacious place. It is free of personal needs or meanings or even interpretations. Prayer lies in pure moments of right here, right now.

As long as we stay in the world of preference and choice, we keep ourselves as the first reference point.

In contemplative prayer we move from the arena of merit, of reward and punishment, to the realm of pure grace and freedom.

Spiritual discernment is the ability to stand away from ourselves and listen and look with a kind of calm, non-judgmental objectivity. Otherwise the ‘I’ that I am cannot separate from its identification with its own thoughts and feelings.

Most people become their thoughts. They do not have thoughts and feelings; the thoughts and feelings have them.

In the silence of contemplation we begin to observe the process whereby we actively choose and create what we pay attention to. That is why the first twenty minutes are usually so tedious. For the first twenty minutes only the primary agenda shows itself.

If we haven’t been trained to recognize our fears and to let go of them, we will feed them.

In extended silence we can observe ourselves and can feel the changes that take place in us. We can feel emotional changes, moment by moment in our body.

Only non-knowing is spacious enough to hold and not distort the knowing that is possible in the Spirit.

God comes to us disguised as our life.

Forgiveness is God’s entry into powerlessness, as seen in his image on the cross.

Grace will lead us into fears and voids, and grace will fill us, if we are willing to stay in the void. We mustn’t engineer an answer too quickly. We must not get too settled too fast. For it is so easy to manufacture an answer to take away the anxiety. To stay in God’s hands, to trust, means that to a certain degree I have to stop taking hold of things myself. I have to hold instead to a degree of uncertainty, fear and tension. This takes practice and grace.

We must sacrifice the attachment and the strange satisfaction that problem-solving gives us.

God refuses to be known except by love.

Prayer gives us a sense of abundance and connectedness. It is the ultimate empowerment of the people of God. When the church is no longer teaching the people how to pray it has lost its reason for existence.

Overemphasis on social prayer has left many of our people passive, without a personal prayer life and too comfortable with handed-down religion instead of first-hand experience.

The prayer of words attempts to express our dependence on the great mystery of God. The prayer of silence is not so much to express, but to experience that dependence.

Church only works with people who have some real life with God; otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors.

God looks at the places in us that are trying to say ‘yes’.
The Inner Way, by Joseph Allen

Fragmentation, the crisis of identity and meaning, touches the lives of each of us. Yet the potential for growth and transformation inherent in life’s breakdowns evade most of us. We fail to realize that dark times condition us for God; they invite us to a transformed identity through a deeper faith, hope and love.

Crises appear in each life as a form of death, a disintegration of life. At such times God speaks to interpret our fragmentation and begin our transformation.

Divine grace and human will must work together for transformation to occur.

As in all of nature, disintegration and fragmentation precede rebirth. If we are to grow into a deeper union with God we must accept, even befriend, the diminishments of life inherent in such circumstances.

The modern human being believes that life springs from itself and that he generates his own power and vitality. The proper question for true identity is not ‘who am I?’ but ‘to whom do I belong?’

Prayer puts us in a new context of surprise and amazement about our life. It is the spiritual director’s task to ‘bring people to such a knowledge of self in the presence of God.’

Human interpretation is by definition limited by what our senses can perceive and our minds can grasp, but room must always be left for that which lies beyond our limitations.

The experiences of the past always have a bearing on how one interprets the experience of the present.

The focus of spiritual direction is on experience, not ideas. Moreover this experience is viewed not as an isolated event, but as an expression of the ongoing personal relationship God establishes with each one of us.

God’s question to Adam and Eve ‘Where are you�’ marked the beginning of salvation history. And Adam’s response, ‘I was afraid..and I hid myself’ typifies the human experience ever since.

God did not relent in his question but continued to search for the lost Adam taking on human flesh in Jesus Christ who identified himself as the one who ‘came to seek out and save the lost’.

The truth is that, planted deep within the heart of every human person, fearful in hiding and resistant as we may be, is a yearning to be healed, to be found, to be restored.

Unless we can accept that our sinfulness has been forgiven we will never be able to answer the question ‘Where are you?’ with the reply ‘Here I am�’ the reply that says I truly want to be found.

Good choices come only by way of cooperation with God whereas wrong choices are made without cooperation with God.

God reveals himself in the uncreated parts of your life.

Wherever healing, liberation and growth are taking place, God’s purpose is being realized. Where people are finding one another in true love and reaching their greatest possible fulfillment, God’s activity is achieving its goal. God stands against all that oppresses and limits us, He labours with us, but not in place of us, for liberation, healing, reconciliation, harmony and joy.

God is already at work in us on the side of all that will promote freedom, healing and growth and against everything that afflicts these.

God is there to help draw out of their situation all the good that can possibly be drawn out. And when as spiritual directors we guide others to these same ends, we are collaborating with God’s own work.

God works with us in our sufferings to bring whatever good can be brought out of it.

When we have determined what we most deeply want, we have found what God wants for us.

We should view everything that happens as an opportunity given us by God. Whoever believes in accidents does not believe in God.
Waiting on God, by Andrew Murray, 1895, Nisbet & Co., London, Eng.

We need to train ourselves more to wait on God, and to make the cultivation of a deeper sense of His presence, of more direct contact with Him, of entire dependence on Him, the main purpose of our ministry.

The three steps needed to grow spiritually are: a clear view of the possibilities of Christian attainment; a deliberate purpose to live this life; and the disposition to look up and wait upon the Lord for all that we need to enable us to grow.

“My soul waits only upon God, for all my expectation is from Him.” (Psalm 62:1)

Waiting on God is itself the highest salvation. It is ascribing to Him the glory of being All; it is the experiencing that He is All to us.
Waiting on God combines the deep sense of our helplessness within ourselves to work what is divinely good, with the perfect assurance that God will work out our salvation by His divine power.

To wait upon God and have the heart filled with faith in His working, and in that faith to pray for it to do so in us, is our only wisdom.

Waiting on God gives Him time in His own way and divine power to come to us.

Be still before Him and allow the Holy Spirit to waken and stir up in our soul the child-like disposition of absolute dependence and confident expectation.

God has so ordained it that waiting on Him should be the greatest honour we give Him.

Our prayer should appeal to God to remember that we are waiting for Him, looking for an answer. It is a great thing for a soul not only to wait upon God, but to be filled with such a consciousness that its whole spirit and disposition is that of a childlike confidence that says, ‘Lord, you know that I wait on You.’

Christ has redeemed us wholly for God, and made a life of continual abiding in His presence possible. Our highest blessedness therefore is in having as much of God as we can.

Faith, in waiting on God, comes from the quiet confident persuasion that it is not in vain.

In waiting on God our eye, looking up to Him, meets His, looking down upon us.

All the exercises of the spiritual life, our reading and praying, our willing and doing, have their great value. But they can go no farther than to point the way and prepare us in humility to look to and depend alone upon God Himself, and in patience to wait for His good time and mercy.

God is able to do for us exceeding abundantly above what we ask or think, and we are in danger of limiting Him when we confine our desires and prayers to our own thoughts of them.

Patience is our highest grace and blessedness. It honours God by giving Him time to have His way with us. It is the highest expression of our faith in His goodness and faithfulness. It brings the soul towards perfect rest in the assurance that God is truly carrying on His work.

True patience is the losing of our self-will in His perfect will.

It is God, revealing Himself in us as our life and strength, that alone can enable us to leave all things in His hands.

God has promised to make known His will to us by His Spirit. Our position is to be that of waiting for His counsel, as the only true guide to our thoughts and actions.

The great danger in all our assemblies is that, in our consciousness of having our Bible, and our past experience of God�s leading, our sound creed, and our honest wish to do God’s will, we will trust in these and not realize that it is in every step that we need and can have heavenly guidance.

More stillness of soul to realize God’s presence; more consciousness of ignorance of what God’s greater plans may be; more faith in the certainty that God has greater things to show us; more longing that He Himself may be revealed in new glory; these must be the marks of the assemblies of God’s people if they would avoid the reproach, “They waited not for His counsel.”

It is what we really know of God in our personal experiences, conquering the enemies within, witnessing God reigning and ruling within, revealing Himself in His Holiness and Power in our inmost being that will be of true spiritual blessing to our fellowmen.

Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him.

The quiet rest in Him alone is the confession of our desire to sink into our nothingness, and to let Him work and reveal Himself.

With Open Hands, Henri J. M. Nouwen, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1972

I believe that what is most personal is also the most universal.

Praying is no easy matter. It demands a relationship in which you allow God to enter into the very center of your person, allow him to speak there, allow him to touch the sensitive core of your being, and allow him to see so much that you would rather leave in the darkness.

You feel a bit of a new freedom when praying suddenly becomes a joy, a spontaneous reaction to the world and the people around you. It becomes effortless, inspired and lively. You begin to suspect that to pray is to live.

To be calm and quiet all by yourself means being fully awake and following with close attention every move going on inside you.� It involves a self-discipline where the urge to get up and go is recognized as a temptation to look elsewhere for what is really close at hand.

Perhaps there is some fear and uncertainty when we first come upon this discipline, but slowly we begin to see developing an order and a familiarity which summons our longing to stay home.

We recapture our own life from within.

Through prayer we learn the mastery of the gentle hand. This is the hand of the gardener who carefully makes space for a new plant to grow and who doesn’t pull weeds too rashly, but only uproots those which threaten to choke the young life. Under this gentle regime, we find ourselves once again becoming masters of our own house.

It is in the silence of the ‘poor in spirit’ that you learn to see your life in its proper perspective. In this silence, the false pretenses fade away and you can see the world again with a certain distance.

Prayer is acceptance. A person who prays is someone standing with their hands open to the world.

Prayer is living in constant expectation that God who makes everything new will cause you to be born again.

In prayer I am constantly on the way, on pilgrimage.

The most important thing about prayer is not whether it is classified as petition, thanksgiving or praise, but whether God sees it as a prayer of hope, or of little faith.

The prayer of little faith is filled with wishes which beg for immediate fulfillment. It has a great deal of fear and anxiety about it.

Hope is an attitude where everything stays open before me. It is daring to stay open to whatever today will offer me, or tomorrow, two months from now or a year from now, that is hope.

Whenever we pray with hope, we put our lives in the hands of God. Fear and anxiety fade away and everything we are given and everything we are deprived of is nothing but a finger pointing out the direction of God’s hidden promise.

A prayer of hope is a prayer that disarms you and extends you far beyond the limits of your own longings.

The praying person not only says, ‘I can’t do it and I don’t understand it,’ but also, ‘Of myself, I don’t have to be able to do it, and of myself, I don’t have to understand it.’

Prayer is primarily a calling to find what your own place is in the world and to live in that place.

As your life itself becomes more and more of a prayer you notice more than ever that you are always busy being converted.

You are a Christian only in so far as you look forward to a new self and a new world.

Prayer means being constantly ready to let go of your certainty, and to move on further than where you now are. That is why praying demands poverty, that you always begin afresh. Whenever you willingly choose this poverty you make yourself vulnerable, but you become free to see the world in its true form.

God is a deeply moved God whose heart is greater than mine.
 

St. John of the Cross: a spirituality of substance, edited by Peter Slattery, St. Paul’s Press, NY, 1994

We need to abandon any imperfect notion of God and convert ourselves to the one, true God–the one who cannot be manipulated, nor domesticated, nor allow us to remain comfortable in our illusions.

We are called to the God who challenges us to continual conversion. Only if we believe and follow this God will our spirituality develop.

The desert is a form of liberation because it forces us to face the truth about ourselves, our lives and our relationships. In the desert, we are stripped away from all our illusions about ourselves we are set free.

Purification helps us encounter God without deforming him, but rather letting him be God in us. St. John’s writings represent the encounter and the experience of love with a God who has been set free from our projections and manipulations, a God who makes us share in his way of being.

A theology of the spiritual life attends to what God is doing, and where his ‘first loving us’ wants to lead us.

When we see ourselves in truth, we assume our own poverty and eliminate from our ways of thinking anything that smacks of the powerful.

“The glory of God is the human person, fully alive in the kingdom.” -Irenaeus.

We have no need to desire anything because, in desiring the All, we find everything else.

We seek to be God’s delight, not to have God become our delight.

True spirituality begins in the dark, in powerlessness. It replaces the certainties of overconfident belief with the purity of longing.

Prayer, by its nature, involves a sense of incompleteness and thus of longing in truth.

Prayer is not so much a matter of speaking to God but listening to him at work in the world as well as in ourselves. It is listening to what the Spirit, more intimate to ourselves than we are, is saying within.

Prayer ultimately leads us to go beyond anything that can be known. We travel unknowing into an unknown land and we learn how to stay there, knowing naught.

The high point in this sense is also the lowest, humility, the truthful realization that we are not in charge of our lives, but beholden to the one who draws us to him in order to complete us.

Prayer is movement, the clearly imprinted trace of God which is revealed to the soul and which it follows in response to the call to faith.

The soul lives in that which it loves.

All spiritual life involves an alternation of light and darkness, consolation and desolation. God leads by way of both manifestation and obscurity.

The contemplative light and love seem to originate from a place in us that is prior to psychological and conceptual consciousness, from what some spiritual writers call the ground of the soul.

The more one is able to let go and abandon psychological and conceptual ideas of God and the life of faith, the more aware one becomes of the deeper substance present in oneself, and of the way in which God reveals his presence there.

Even thoughts about God can be a distraction from a deeper and different knowledge of God. As well, one’s feelings about God can at times of prayer also block us from a deeper participation in God’s reality.

In our continual conversion, experiences of both richness and poverty under God are elements of his transforming action of love.

As our relationship with the Holy Spirit is intensified, that in us which is in opposition to God, or contrary to the form of Christ, becomes increasingly painful and intolerable.� The unconverted elements of the self that are unlike Christ appear as poverty in the light of God’s nearness.

Another cause of psychological pain in contemplative growth is the breakdown of our sense of effective mastery of ourselves and of our propensity for self-projection in the spiritual life. In short, there is an erosion of the sense of being able to deal with God on our own terms.

In spiritual growth, one loses and moves beyond the old sense of reality and self, one that was largely self-constructed, and begins to take on, in a far more radical way, the form of Christ.

In following Christ in this way, without laying down one’s own ground rules and conditions, we grow into dimensions of the reality of God’s love which lie beyond what we can comprehend, experience or place in any systematic order.

We are stripped of all guarantees which are rooted in the self, and we begin to live on the faith, trust and love that we have for God. We now experience God more as he is as sheer Mystery.

The night is not just about our learning to wait until what we want comes our way. It is about being so widened in the waiting that it changes our wanting.
As we grow in spiritual truth we become aware that what we really want is God, and nothing but God. As we are willing to consign all of our life and experience to God, we will begin to discover a strange fullness in the emptiness.

One must be prepared to abandon all projections that involve self-constitution before God and consign oneself in an ongoing act of trust that allows oneself to be constituted only by God. For to consign oneself freely to the action of God’s love is to truly love God.

Growth in God means being stripped of all guarantees which are rooted in the self, and demands an existential shift towards placing our trust and hope upon the guarantees that God provides in Christ alone. It is hardly surprising that such growth will present us with some difficulties.

The abandonment of self-mastery and the taking on of a radical dependence on God will necessarily be accompanied by a sense of being undone. We might feel we are being annihilated, yet such an anxiety is quite ungrounded.

The very fact that one can no longer find one’s guarantees in oneself may indeed be a sign that progress in the life with God is happening.

The very anguish that arises from feeling distant from God has its basis in love. If we did not love God, we would hardly care if we were united with him or not.

In the form of Christ one perceives something of the contours and meaning of that which we experience most profoundly within ourselves. Our deepest inner experience and the reality of Christ have become one.
The heart creates idols and, in giving itself to these idols, in centering its life around them as though they were life-giving, the heart becomes enslaved. It is no longer free to respond to the invitation coming from the gracious presence of God in its center.

Only God’s love can entice us from our idols. This love re-orders our other loves. It allow us to relax our grip on life and to continue our journey in trust.

There is a remarkable transformation of the heart’s desires as a result of surrendering to God in our soul’s center. Our desire and God’s desire now join in a consonance of desire.

John of the Cross writes: “What you desire me to ask for, I ask for; and what you do not desire, I do not desire, nor can I, nor does it even enter my mind to desire it. My petitions are now much more valuable in your sight, since they come from you, and you move me to make them.”

Although the movements of the soul belong to it, they belong to it because God works them in it, for it wills and consents to His will.

The ultimate detachment would be to learn how to live without a ‘why.’

When the whole personality has been brought into harmony with its centre, it no longer wars against itself in a disfunctional manner. It is integrated in a graced whole and can love God and the world without distorting it or having the heart be fragmented or enslaved by it. This person loves with a freedom of spirit, without clutching.

In their dance, the flame of our spirit and the flame of God�s spirit touch one another, and go apart. They flicker within one another and sometimes are lost within one another. As we participate more with God, He invites us to give ourselves over to the flame without fear, but with patience, perseverance and trust.

Community and Growth, by Jean Vanier, Griffin Books, Toronto, 1979

A community becomes truly radiant when all its members have a sense of urgency about becoming who they are.

It is when the members of the community realize that they are not there simply for themselves, or their own sanctification, but in order to welcome the gift of God, to hasten His Kingdom and to quench the thirst in the parched hearts of others.

Spiritual love is not sentimental. It is an attraction to others which gradually becomes expressed in commitment.

If we come into community without knowing that the reason we have come is to discover the mystery of forgiveness, we will soon be disappointed.

A community is not simply a group of people who love each other. It is a current of life, a heartbeat, a soul, a spirit.

Simplicity, being no more or no less than we are, is discovered in community. It is knowing that we are accepted with our qualities, our flaws, as we most deeply are.

The more a community deepens, the more vulnerable and the more sensitive its members become.

Community can never take precedence over individuals. In fact, its beauty and unity come from the radiance of each individual, in its own light, truth and love, expressing free union with others.

A community which grows in prayer and love is a sign of the resurrection.

Roots, as provided by community, are there so that flowers and fruits can grow. And it’s in the fruit that you find the seeds of tomorrow.

A community has to learn how to be cheerful about letting people leave and how to trust that God will send other brothers and sisters, according to His will. If our communities are born from the will of God, if it is the Holy Spirit who is at the origin of them, our Heavenly Father will send the people we need.

The risk for people who leave one community to go into another is that they will arrive as adults and not as children. They will come to offer service. They already know what to do. I really wonder whether anyone can commit themselves in a community if they do not first live a period of childhood there.

Humility and trust are more at the foundation of community life than are perfection and devotion.

“Let anyone who is not in community beware of being alone. But also let anyone who cannot be alone beware of community.”

“We are on the road to which you have called us, but whose name you have not yet given us. We are carrying the poverty of not knowing where you are leading us.”

Community is always in a state of growth. The more it does the more it discovers its own deep meaning and ethos of life.

A community gradually discovers as it grows that it is not there for itself. It belongs to humanity. It has receive a gift which must bear fruit for others. If it closes in on itself, it will suffocate.

A community is like a seed which must grow to become a tree which will give abundant fruit, in which all the birds of the air can come to make their nests. It must open its arms wide and hold out its hands to give freely what it has freely received.

A faith community must both exist apart from society and within it, open to it at the same time.

Members of a community have to befriend time. They have to learn that most things resolve themselves if they are given enough time.

It can be a great mistake to want, in the name of progress or clarity, to push things too quickly to resolution. It is better to see time as a friend.

Contemplate the truth of these passages; read them slowly, meditatively, allowing them to arouse the heart to prayer. Let them simply remind you of your heart’s chief desire–to be always close to God.

Prayer in Practice; Simon Tugwell, Templegate Publ., Springfield, Ill. 1974

Far and away the most important thing for us, if we want to pray, is seriously to undertake to become the kind of people who can pray, who have room in their lives for prayer.

If we make room in our lives for a God to whom we can pray, then prayer should, by and large, look after itself.

There is no short cut to true spirituality, there is no substitute for conversion of the heart.

“We do not know what to pray.” (Rom 8:26). This elusiveness of prayer is an integral part of the scriptural view of prayer as something which God retains under his own control, subject to his own administration.

Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we should be able to refer it, in all simplicity, to the Lord.

It is the prayer of the Holy Spirit praying in us in accordance with God that really matters; this is the prayer of the heart that is heard by God.

We should avoid the presumptuous supposition that we shall actually be able to pray just because we have decided to pray. The most we can do is place ourselves ready and alert for prayer.

Prayer is a ‘time off’ from playing God unto ourselves.

One can be too polite with God. If we only say the things that we consider to be expected of us, we shall never get beyond the most superficial encounter with him.
The minimum requirement for prayer is intention.

Thinking about God all too easily leads us to treat him as if he were absent. But he is not absent.

We do not have to conjure his presence up by making acts of thought or imagination. We know he is there; and acting upon that knowledge, we simply talk to him.

It is important to realize that one is not trying to do or achieve anything. One is simply there, in the presence of God.

Thoughts are a bit like spoilt children trying to attract attention to themselves. If you ignore them, refusing to be distracted by them, then sooner or later they will get bored and go away.

What is important is that our prayer should reach down to the core of our being, the point of unity of our identity. This is something deeper than and underlying all our intellectual and emotional activity. It is from here, if anywhere, that our thoughts and feelings can be “taken captive” in Christ (2 Cor. 10:5)

It is when this deep centre is filled with the peace of Christ that our lives are ‘kept’ in and by him.

We discover ourselves in God and him in us. Finding the place of the heart, we shall find it already indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

Familiarity with God’s ways will enable us more and more to recognize certain patterns, certain configurations, certain little details, as signs of his artistry.

Prayer is the articulation of desire; and God hears our desires even before we articulate them.

Bringing our desires out into the open in prayer is the acknowledgment that they are already known to God, and the confession that we are glad that it is so.

As we grow in faith, we shall find more and more that our aspirations and desires draw us first to God, and only secondly to undertake measures for their realization.

There is nothing contained in the future which is not already contained within the presentness of Jesus Christ.

Faith punctures the self-sufficiency of our world so that there is room for God to be God. Perfect faith is when we are nothing but space for God to be God. Then God is no longer an object to us, nor we to him.

Whenever we love, we are no longer the center of ourselves.

Pray always empty-handed. Faith brings us before God humble and poor.

It is the perfection of all creatures that God should be all in all.

It is only by the Spirit that we recognize the Spirit.

The Soul of Prayer; P.T. Forsyth, Regent College Publ., Van., B.C. 1997.

Most of the difficulties of prayer are our own making. We get more interested in ourselves than in God. We get absorbed in what is or is not happening in us.
We must train our thinking, our imagination, our understanding to begin with God not ourselves.

Prayer is the most personal thing that any of us do, the most human act in which we can engage. We are more ourselves, our true, image-of-God selves, when we pray than at any other time.

Left to ourselves we soon become selfish, preoccupied with our pious feelings, our religious progress, our spiritual standing. We need guides and masters to refocus our attention on God, to keep us ever mindful of the priority of God.

At all times let us think greatly of God and kindly of men, faithfully of the past, lovingly of the present, and hopefully of the future.

All true prayer promotes its own progress and increases our power to pray.

Not to want to pray is the sin behind any sin. And it ends in not being able to pray.

What we ask for is chiefly the power to ask more and to ask better. We pray for more prayer.

The prayer within all prayer is ‘Thy will be done.’ My prayer is Thy Will. Thou didst create it in me. It is more Thine than mine.

The prayer that reaches heaven began there, when Christ went forth. It began when God turned to beseech us, in Christ. The Spirit went out with the power and function in it to return with our soul.

The whole rhythm of Christ’s soul is of the Godhead going out, and returning on itself.

Our prayer is the answer to God’s.

For it is Christ at prayer who lives in us, and we are conduits of the Eternal Intercession.

The intercession of Christ in heaven is the continuity and consummation of His supreme work on earth. To share it is the meaning of praying in the Spirit.

We cannot move fast to such a fine product as piety. It is a growth in grace.

Prayer makes us realize how far from God we were.

It is true religion in which the soul becomes very sure of God and of itself in prayer. It is the great school of both proficiency and of veracity of the soul.

True prayer does not allow us to deceive ourselves.

Not to pray is not to discern life not to discern the things that really matter, and the powers that really rule.

Prayerlessness is an injustice and a damage to our own soul.

True prayer is the supreme function of the personality of prayer, and it is personality with this function that God seeks above all to rear.

In prayer we become more and more sure that He is sure.

All along, Christ is being formed in us as we pray; and our converse with God goes on to become an element of the discourse between the Father and the Son.

Prayer gives us bearings in a world otherwise without form and void.

Prayer is the atmosphere of revelation.

We touch the last reality directly in prayer.

God’s Spirit returns to Him who gave it; and returns not void, but bearing our souls with Him.

The greatest law of Nature is its bias towards God, to return to His rest. This comes to light especially in man’s gravitation towards Him, when His prodigal comes home to Him.

The soul runs its true course back to God its Creator, who has placed on it the destiny of this return, and who leaves it no peace till it finds its goal in Him.

It is in prayer that our real idea of God appears, and in prayer that our real relation to God truly shows itself.

In Christ’s intercession for us, our prayer, broken, soiled, and feeble as it is, is caught up and made prayer indeed and power with God. His intercession prays for our very prayer, and atones for the sin in it.

Prayer is our chief answer to the gospel. It plants us at the very centre of our own personality, which gives the soul the true perspective of itself; it also sets us at the very centre of the world of God, which gives us the true hierarchy of things as they are.

Nothing does so much for our originality, so much to make us our own true selves, to stir up all that it is in us to be, and to hallow all that we are, as does prayer. It opens a fountain at the centre of our personality, where we are sustained because we are created anew and not simply refreshed. For here the springs of life continually rise. And here the eye gains a second sight from which it discerns a new world. It sees two worlds at once, heaven and earth.

In prayer we are regathered in soul from the fancies that bewilder us and the distractions that dissolve us into the dust of the world.

The note of prayer can become the habit of the heart in such a way that when we are released from our occupations, the soul immediately rebounds to its true bent, its quest for God.

IF you are not praying towards God, you are bent towards something else. If our passion is habitually set upon pleasure, knowledge, wealth, honor, or power we are in a state of prayer to these things or for them. We pray without ceasing. The great difference is the object of it. To whom do we pray.

It is the one who most truly has God who most truly seeks Him.

There is no real intimacy with the gospel which does not mean a new sense of God’s holiness, and it may be long before we realize that the same holiness that condemns is that which save.

The more we grasp the gospel, the more it abases us.

We are not the fire, but we should live where it burns.
The gospel is continually acting on us, continually searching our inner selves, so that no part of us may be unforgiven, unfed, or unsanctified. We cannot hold it and examine it at arm’s length. It enters into us. It evokes a perpetual comment on our souls, and puts us continually on self-judgment.

Everything that rebukes our self-satisfaction does still more to draw out our faith.

It inspires not mindless prayer but that prayer which is the wrestling of the conscience and not merely the cry of the heart, the prayer for reconciliation and redemption and not merely for guidance and comfort.

Private prayer is the greatest forge of personality. It places one in direct and effective contact with God the Creator, the source of originality and of the new creation.

Nothing makes us so original as does prayer. And we cannot be true Christians without being original. To be so we must be one, and closely one, with God.

Prayer is for the religious life what original research is for the scientist.

Prayer is not a frame of mind, but a great energy. The person who prays consistently rises to conceive his work as an active function of the work of Christ. He links his faith therefore with the intercession which covers the whole energy of Christ in his kingdom.

Amid the wreck of my little world He is firm, and I in Him. I justify God even in the ruins; in His good time I shall arrive.

The Dark Night of the Soul; St. John of the Cross, Hodder & Stoughton Publ., London, 1988

Spiritual self-restraint and self-denial leads to a very different kind of character which includes reverence and submission in everything.

God, in helping people make spiritual progress, often does this by bringing them into the dark night and gives them dryness and inner darkness. He takes from them everything that is irrelevant and immature.

In these times of dryness, people undergo great trials. These trials are not due so much to the dryness which they suffer, but because they fear that they will be lost on the road. They believe that spiritual blessings are a thing of the past , and that God has abandoned them.

Delight and pleasure even in spiritual things can cloud and impede the spirit. Times of dryness of the senses shed light and bring true understanding.

Times of trouble give us a correct estimation of how empty and naked the soul is, and how much it needs God’s power.

“O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Psalm 63:1-2)

It is from the dryness and the emptiness of this night of the desire that the soul becomes spiritually humble, which is the opposite virtue of sin, which is spiritual pride.

Complacency and presumption are things which belong to the so-called prosperous days of the soul. The soul now displays no confidence in the self, which is the essence of godly reverence, which enables the virtues to grow.

The road of contemplation is where God himself feeds and refreshes the soul directly, without the soul’s help or meditation.

Contemplation is nothing less than a secret, peaceful and loving infusion from God.

Reverence is the key to all the other virtues

The pupil of the owl sees less as it becomes more contracted as the light increases. The more brilliant the light is, and the more directly we look into the sun the less we see.

God only touches the soul in his mercy and does not oppress it, since his aim is not to punish the soul, but to bless it.

“He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings deep shadows into the light.” (Job 12:22)

When sunlight shines through a spotless pane of glass we can hardly see it. But the light appears bright in our sight when it strikes a lot of dust in the air.

The soul wishes to love God with all its strength and power. It cannot do this if it is distracted by other pleasures.

The soul loves in numerous ways, in all its actions and thoughts that it is involved in.
The nature of love is to be united, linked up with and at one with the object of its love.

The soul wants to be made perfect in love. So when it is not perfect in love, it hungers and thirsts after this union which it lacks.

The soul can reach a stage where it belongs more to heaven and to God than to itself.

Many people believe that they have their desires fixed on God and on spiritual things when in reality they are merely following their own human inclinations.

One of the characteristics of God’s way of communicating is that it is very intimate and spiritual in its relationship to the soul. It goes beyond all the senses which immediately stand before it in silence.

All a person can say is that they are satisfied, serene, content, and aware of God’s presence. As far as they are concerned everything is all right

Contemplation absorbs and engulfs the soul in its secret depths so that the soul feels it is distanced from all created things. The soul now feels that it has been transported to a place of unfathomable solitude. It is like a vast and endless desert where no human person can travel. It has many delights but it is also lonely because it is so huge. The soul finds itself hidden in a secret place.

The state of perfection cannot exist unless the soul has both knowledge of God and knowledge of itself.. It finds itself exalted by the knowledge of God and humbled through knowledge of itself.

The soul never remains static as it travels on the road of contemplation as it is always rising or falling.

True love of God naturally expels self-love.

Only love unites and cements the soul with God.

The spiritual blessings of contemplation really belong to the next life rather than to this life, so when one of them is received in this life it is really a preparation for the next life.

The quiet rest of the soul comes from being united to God, hidden from all the attacks of the devil and from the attacks of its own senses and passions.

Beginning to Pray; Anthony Bloom,
Paulist Press, Mahwah, NJ, 1970

Prayer is really our humble ascent towards God, a moment when we turn Godwards, shy of coming near, knowing that if we were to meet Him too soon, before His grace has had time to help us to be capable of meeting Him, it would be judgment.

It is not a journey into my own inwardness, it is a journey through my own self, in order to emerge from the deepest level of self into the place where He is, the point at which God and I meet.

Gradually what happens is that the awareness of God grows within you to such an extent that whether you are with people, listening, speaking or whether you are alone working, the awareness is so strong as to draw you to pray continually.

Theophan the Recluse says: “The awareness of God shall be with you as clearly as a toothache.” It is an ache that we be a longing for God, a feeling that ‘I am alone, where is He’ whenever you have lost touch in prayer.

If we use crumbs of wasted time to try to build short moments for recollection and prayer we will discover that there is a lot of time in a day to spend with God.

Thanks be to Him that He does not always present Himself to us when we we wish to meet Him, because we might not be able to endure such a meeting.

Be patient about prayer. Wait until the longing for God is sincere, until you get the desperate feeling and feel your heart saying “I am alone, where is He”.

If we imagine that we can sustain spontaneous prayer thoughout our day, we are in a childish delusion.

It is so easy to get inattentive, to slip from alertness to dreaming in prayer. Let us start to learn to keep prayerful attention.

It is greed, fear and curiosity which make us live outwardly. Like tentacles reaching outward, interested in all that is around us, filling the inside with things from the outside so that precious little is left of you inside, because everything is extroverted.

You cannot go inwards if you are living completely outward.

We hardly ever live from the inside out; instead we live in response to incitement, to excitement; we live always in reaction to what is outside us.

When we are left without anything that stimulates us to think, speak or act, we realize that there is very little in us to give us life.� We discover that we do not act from within ourselves but actually live a life in response to the outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to respond with life.

Try to find time to stay alone with yourself, doing nothing. Discover boredom; discover how little we have to offer to ourselves as food for thought, for emotion and for life.

We must stay the course until the anguish so fills all our mind, all our heart, all our will with a sense that unless God comes I am lost, there is no hope; to return to activity without God will be to return to the realm of delusion, of reflected life, but not to real life.

True prayer comes from true need

Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough. Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Each day is God’s own, it is absolutely new, absolutely fresh. It has never existed before. You must face the day with the readiness that anything may happen, whether you enjoy it or not.

If you walk in the name of the Lord through a day which has come fresh and new out of His own Hands, and has been blessed for you to live with it, then you can act and pray in one breath because all situations that follow one another require God’s blessing.

We continually try to live an inch ahead of ourselves.; preventing us from being where we really are, in the present moment.
What can prevent you from praying is that you allow yourself to be in the storm, or you allow the storm to come inside you instead of letting it rage around you.

Finding God in All Things; A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. William A. Barry, SJ, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1991

At every moment of our existence God is communicating to us who God is, is trying to draw us into an awareness, a consciousness of the reality of who we are in God’s sight.

Whether we are aware of it or not, at every moment of our existence we are encountering God, who is trying to catch our attention, trying to draw us into a reciprocal conscious relationship.

Prayer helps us become more aware of the reality of our existence as the object of God’s communication.

We are not always alert to the presence of God. The religious dimension of experience is encountered by the person of faith who is on the alert for God.

Prayer heightens our awareness, it sharpens our ability to feel the ‘finger of God.’

Silence and solitude have meaning. They are not simply spaces to fill with activity or words, but a time to listen and rest in peace and an ever-increasing sense of being loved.

There is one thing that is primarily needed to undertake the spiritual journey, great desires.

We all experience internal ups and downs. In the process of noticing these various movements of our hearts we will have to learn to discern in our experiences what is of God from what is not of God. We must learn to examine the day and what is moving through it in terms of spiritual light or spiritual darkness.

The enjoyment of God should be the supreme end of prayer; and it is in that enjoyment of God that we feel not only saved but safe; we are conscious of truly belonging to God.

We all have experiences of desiring, experiences which are also accompanied by a feeling of great well-being. These experiences are experiences of being touched by the creative desire of God who desires us into being and continues us in being.

The desire I experience is that of God creating me now in all the particulars of my present existence. It is the deepest desire within me and is in tune with God’s one intention in creating the universe. That desire can become the ruling passion in my life, if I let it.

Insofar as this desire reigns in our heart, we also desire to live out our lives in harmony with this desire, to live in harmony with God’s creative purpose for us, to choose what will be more in tune with our desire for union with God.

God’s revelation of sin and sinful tendencies is enabling; it gives us courage to pick ourselves up and reform our lives.

In the presence of Holiness we become acutely conscious of how unholy we are and of how much we are in need of forgiveness.

When God reveals sin to us it is always with the purpose of moving us to amendment of life and of giving us the power to change.

Every life is different; we need to let God use the one we have and not bemoan the one we do not have.

We can discern that an experience is of God if it leads us forward, gives us hope, moves us toward freedom, indeed, helps us to move at all. The effects of the evil spirit are to keep us in a rut, asking unanswerable questions, leading us nowhere but to ennui and despair.

We are all addicted to something that keeps us from fully desiring what we most deeply want, namely God.

If we allow God to lead us our deepest desires will gradually emerge. These desires will also change in the course our developing relationship with him.

Our relationship with God will not only change our minds, it will develop our hearts, our desires and our hopes.

Desires are not under our control. If we do no like some of our desires, we can ask God to help us to overcome them or to change them, but ultimately we can only desire what we really do desire.

We cannot make ourselves desire union with God or intimacy with Jesus. But we can ask for a grace that is not in our power to produce in ourselves.

If people do not desire something which they want to desire, they can ask God to help them to desire it, to attract them to this desire.

Only when we have discerned what God has chosen for us, do we truly have a choice of whether we will choose it or not.

In order to have life we must not be afraid to lose it. If we try to protect ourselves from any loss because of fear, we are trapped. We cannot enjoy that which we are protecting.

The maxim of illusory religion runs: “Fear not; trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you; that of real religion, on the contrary, is ‘Fear not’; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.”

The resurrection of Jesus demonstrates real religion. The passion and death really did happen, but the resurrection of Jesus says, they are nothing to be afraid of.

Prayer; Living with God; Simon Tugwell, O.P., Templegate Publ., Springfield, Ill., 1975

Prayer is keeping company with God, and accepting the consequences. It challenges us to accept the freedom, the mystery and the otherness of God as well as the unpredictability of ourselves.

One of the main problems about our relationship with God is that half the time we forget about it.

Prayer should appeal to our urge to explore, to adventure.

If we would fully accept the Lord’s grace, we shall first have to look deeply at the obstacles that block his way, obstacles that are there because we want to block his way. We want to exclude the remembrance of God, so that we may be God to ourselves.

If the basic reason why God is crowded out of our lives is simply that we want to be God ourselves, then it stands to reason that the very first point of conversion will be to stop being God, and so to leave room for God to be God.

If we would learn the true sense in which God is God we must first unlearn that kind of order which we try to impose on the world and on ourselves and on one another, simply to subject everything to ourselves, to protect us from the wideness and freedom of God’s world.

Any real growth in prayer will lead us into the desert, into the place of where we can no longer find our own bearings.

We must come our from behind the security of our home-made identity, our self-appointed responsibilities, into the spaciousness of God’s world whose dimensions and orientation we shall only gradually learn to recognize as freedom.

We must be ready to be dismantled, over and over again, until we are entirely remade, receiving our likeness to God from God himself.

Accepting the God who’s name is ‘I am’ means that we give up our preoccupation with who or what we are; we give up asserting our own ‘I am’ in favour of a more essential and more real ‘I am’ on the part of God.

God’s providence means that he integrates all our free choices, mistakes and sins and all, into his plan. He is the expert dancer who can make dance even out of the stumblings of the most atrocious partner.

Not to be downcast after committing a fault is one of the marks of true sanctity, the knowledge that God will know how to draw glory even from our faults.

God’s providence means that wherever we have got to, whatever we have done, that is precisely where the road to heaven begins.

In faith we can let God give us to ourselves, just as at the beginning he gave Adam to Adam. Then we can receive from him all this is ours, all our faculties, all our freedom, our capacity to take initiatives, to make decisions.

When we receive our lives from God our independence is no longer a challenge to God’s sovereignty but is precisely a most wonderful expression of it as we receive our freedom day by day, minute by minute, from the creative love of God.

It is faith that gives God space.

We must learn to be what we are, and that means accepting our limitations, our blindness, our confusion about our motivations, our frequent uncertainty as to whether what we have done was good or bad, helpful or unhelpful; and, accepting all that, to offer it all to God and let him do what he wants with it.

God wants our free will engaged in the working out of his will. He requires us to be people who have a will of our own so that we can unite with his.

Our spiritual life is not a matter of taking our disordered desires and managing not to give in to them, but in cultivating ordered desires and then managing to give into them often.

We must not try to love God. We must become the kind of people who, through prayer, will discover that we do love God and allow that love to flower.

Christian growth should make it harder and harder for us to identify God’s will as something external to us.

As faith becomes more and more operative in our hearts, our spontaneity is transformed at the root so that all our thinking and feeling and wanting is anchored more and more in God’s will.

The spiritual life is a growth in instinctive sensitivity to the will of God. It is a strong and sound confidence that our inventiveness, our freedom, will suggest to us things that are pleasing to our Father.

If we want to pray we must learn how to be empty-handed.

The life which Christ brings us, the life of fellowship with God, does not consist in our drawing God into our world, but in his drawing us into his world.

The centre of our prayer life is not us in our world, but God in his. We are meant to become part of God’s plans, not to make him part of ours.

Religious Affections; Jonathan Edwards, Multnomah Press, Portland, Ore., 1984

True religion is a supernatural gift of God’s Holy Spirit and bears evidence in our responsive affections.

The soul is never indifferent to what it sees. It either likes or dislikes, is pleased or is displeased, approves or rejects.

Like children we should always have our hearts tender. They should be easily affected and moved by spiritual and divine things.

Those kinds of books, types of preaching and liturgies of worship that help us truly worship God in prayer and praises are to be encouraged, as they help to affect deeply the hearts of those who do these things.

There is a natural love to Christ, as to someone that does you good; and there is a spiritual love for Christ himself whereby the Lord alone is exalted.

All that belongs to holiness of the heart, humility, meekness, love, forgiveness and mercy, is the very nature and fruit of true Christianity.

The real strength of the good disciple of Jesus Christ is simply the steadfast maintenance of a holy calmness, meekness, sweetness, and a benevolence of mind that is sustained amidst all the storms, injuries, wrong behaviour, and unexpected acts in this unreasonable world.

Nothing can be more contradictory than a morose, hard, closed, and spiteful Christian.

It is always the nature of spiritual pride to prompt us to seek distinction and singularity.

After conversion, even though the sense of guilt will be removed, one’s sensitivity to sin will be intensified. It is through this sensitivity that the heart will grow in tenderness.

True Christians long to pour out their souls before God in secret, earnest prayer and praise to him, seeking to live more for His glory and to be more conformed to Him each day.

Spiritual good is so satisfying that the more the soul tastes of it and knows its nature, the more it will desire, even when it is already satisfied. The babe, at its mother’s breast, has his sharpest appetite when in the best of health.

Our conversion is only the beginning of God’s work in us. From then on we are called to stand, to press forward, to reach out and continue in prayer, expressing our longing for God both day and night. Our need will grow as will our satisfaction. For the Lord, ‘fills the hungry with good things, while the rich are sent away empty.’

The Holy Spirit gives the soul a natural relish for the sweetness of what is holy and for everything that is holy as it comes into view. He also intensifies a dislike and disgust of everything that is unholy.

True godliness consists not merely in having a heart intent on doing the will of God, but having a heart that actually does it.

God’s desires for us are not dissimilar from our own truest, innermost desires for ourselves.
The reality of prayer in the name of Jesus is the search for a fuller, richer personality, the personality we most deeply long to have.

Silence becomes stale without the Word, but the Word loses its recreative power without the silence of the desert.

We have the Holy Spirit as our guide. But His presence depends also upon the condition that we do not grieve Him nor quench Him’.

The Love of God; Bernard de Clairvaux, Multnomah Press, Portland, Ore., 1983

Knowledge of God comes only through devotion to God.

Silence is the space most worthy of the mystery of God.

“You would not be seeking me if you had not already been found of me.”

Know yourself and you will have a wholesome fear of God. Know God and you will also love God. In the first, wisdom has its beginning; and in the second, it has its crown.

Cultivate the worshipful quest each day with silent meditation on the Word of God, and by prayer that seeks His Presence.

It is the heart, not the reason, which experiences the love of God. This then is faith; God, perceived by the heart.

The Will of God transforms our own will in order that we can love God as we should.
Since the Holy Spirit is the union of the Father and the Son, only by the Holy Spirit will that union between man and God be also restored.

Blessed is the soul with whom God takes up His residence and makes it the place of His rest. Blessed is he who can say, He that formed me has lodged and dwelt in my tabernacle.

God is available to each one, if only we will make it our preoccupation to be with Him and in Him.

Nothing can be so restless and fleeting than my heart. How exceedingly vain, trifling, wandering and unsettled is this vagabond. It is under a thousand different determinations at once. It seeks rest everywhere but finds it not.

Although the heart seeks anxiously for satisfaction yet it cannot attain any until it returns to the All-Sufficient object of its desire.

I can never have mastery of my own heart. Only God has that. So long then, as I am not united to God, I am divided within myself and at perpetual strife within myself.

Union with God can only be secured by love. And subjection to Him can only be grounded in humility. And humility can only be the result of genuinely knowing and believing the truth, that is, the truth of God and of myself.

I must continually discover how vital it is to lay hold of God and to hold Him fast, for it is from Him that I derive my being and without Whom I am nothing.

Because it is of sin that I have departed from my God, the way back to God is by true confession and repentance of those sins which set me at such a distance from Him.

We need only be concerned with our attachment to Christ, for Christ is the Way back to God.

All our desires for God have been placed within our own hearts by His prior desire for us.

No one who has not experienced the love of God can ever comprehend what it is like. And he who has tasted it, will long for it again.

As you grow in grace and continue to knock at the door with more assurance, you will seek and find what you discover is still lacking.

The teaching of the Holy Spirit does not sharpen curiosity, but kindles love.

“Turn Yourself, O my God, toward me, so that You will enable me to be humble.”

Just as the fear of God arises within you from the knowledge of yourself, and the love of God comes from knowing God, so on the contrary, pride arises from the lack of self-knowledge, and despair arises from the lack of the knowledge of God.

“My Beloved is mine, and I am His.” What is that mysterious and mutual love which seems so reciprocally made for each other, which comes with such kindness and familiarity. For you it is Him, and for Him it is you. You are to Him what He is to you.

The soul, seeking God, is anticipated by Him.

Of the Imitation of Christ; Thomas a Kempis, Commission Press, Charlotte, NC, 1963.

The Bible ought always to be read with the assistance of the same Spirit by whose help it was written.

If you would know and learn anything profitable in life, love to be unknown, and to be regarded as of no account.

If you wish to derive profit from reading Scripture, be sure to read with lowliness, simplicity and faith.

Do not trust in your own knowledge, nor in your skill, but rather in the grace of God who helps the humble, and humbles the self-presuming.

It will never hurt you to put yourself under others; but it will be most hurtful to you to put yourself before others, even before one.

The lowly have continual peace, but the heart of the proud is continually disturbed by jealousy and indignation.

He who arranges that we should have temptations in order that we may put forth the effort to overcome them, will himself be at hand to help those who are striving and trusting in his grace.

“Assist me O God in this my good purpose, and grant that this day I may begin again towards my perfection.”

In various ways it comes to pass that we sometimes abandon our good spiritual purposes, and a slight omission in our devotions hardly ever happens without some loss to our souls.

Leave curious matters behind and read such subjects as are calculated to produce faith, more than mere occupation of the mind.� Withdraw from what is superfluous and prefer to live in secret with God.

Do not make it a matter of your concern, who may be for you or against you; but let it be your business and care that God be with you in all you do.

A good peaceful man turns everything to good. He who is truly in peace never suspects other.

All our peace in this life consists in humbly bearing, not escaping, the things we do not like.

We often do wrong and, what is worse, excuse ourselves.

A spiritual person puts the care of their soul above all other concerns. Let nothing be high, nothing great, nothing exalted except God himself, or what is of God.

Remember, you are not more holy because you are praised; neither are you more vile, because you are blamed.

It is a great art to know how to hold converse with Jesus, and to know how to detain Him in the soul is great wisdom.

Be lowly and restful and Jesus will be present with you. Be devout and quiet, and Jesus will remain with you.

Let Jesus be loved with a special love, beyond all who are dear to you.

Blessed are they who strive day by day to gain a greater capacity for receiving heavenly secrets. Blessed are they who are glad to devote their time to God.

If you unduly desire the things which are present, you will lose those which are eternal and heavenly. Use the temporal; desire the eternal.

Allow God to do as he pleases with you. He knows what is best for you. Whatever he does with you, it can be nothing but good.

Choose always to have less rather than more. Seek always the lower place, and to be under all. This is the way of peace and of true liberty.

O Lord we are in darkness, and by vanity are soon misled and led astray.

If you seek this or that, and whether to be here or there for your own convenience, or for the sake of having your own way, you will never be at rest, nor free from anxiety.

You ought to aim diligently at this, that, in every place, action, and outward employment, you may be inwardly free and self-controlled; and that all things may be under you, and not you under them. That you may be lord and master of your actions, and not a slave or hireling.

If Thou art present all things are delightful, but if Thou art absent all things are wearisome. Thou makes us to think well of all, and to praise Thee in all circumstances. If anything is to be pleasant and delightful, Thy grace must accompany it.

Thou aimest at my salvation and turnest all things to my profit.