Tag: silence

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The Rhythm of Life – 21 Questions that will Change Your Life – Question #6: What Makes You Feel Alive?

“Welcome back to 21 questions that will change your life.

Question #6 is about the things you can’t live without. Most of us can live without actual materials things, but there are “things” we cannot live without. A bird cannot live without flying and a fish cannot live without swimming. These things are so much a part of who they are that their life is inextricably linked.

Question #6: What is something you have to do, because if you don’t your soul will start to die?

Musicians say they cannot live without music. Artists say they cannot live without art. Parents say they cannot live without their children. Inventors say they cannot live without the chance to invent again. My grandmother said she couldn’t live without her garden. Some can’t live without golf. Many of the saints could not live without prayer, reflection, silence, and solitude. And none of us can live without God. It is in Him that we live and move and have our being.

What do you need that you don’t have? What is it that you cannot live without? In what way is your soul withering and dying? And what can you do about it?”

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Minute Meditation – God in All Things

We need to see silence, and nothingness itself, as a kind of being in the great chain of being, maybe the first link from which all others emerge. St. Bonaventure, the Italian spiritual genius who picked up the intellectual thread from the non-academic Francis, led us through the great chain of being from material things, to inner soul, to the Divine. John Duns Scotus, an early Franciscan, said you may speak of being with one voice from the being of the earth itself, to the waters upon the earth to the minerals within the earth, the flowers and trees and grasses, the animals, the humans, the angelic choirs, the divine. Both of these mystics would have said that once you stop seeing the divine in any one link of that chain, the whole thing will fall apart. It is either all God’s work or you have a hard time finding God in mere parts. That split and confused world is the postmodern world we live in today, which no longer knows how to surround and ground all things in silence. This is not an oversimplification. Either you see God in all things, or very quickly you cannot see God anywhere, even in your own species.

—from the book Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation by Richard Rohr

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Prayer and Action

There surely is a world of difference between the prayer of action and that of silence or word. Here it is not by listening and responding, not by diving down into silence, but by acting, by doing, that I communicate with God. Whatever I can do lovingly can become prayer of action.  Nor is it necessary that I explicitly think of God while working or playing. Sometimes this would hardly be possible. While proofreading a manuscript, I better keep my mind on the text, not on God. If my mind is torn between the two, the typos will slip through like little fish through a torn net. God will be present precisely in the loving attention I give to the work entrusted to me. By giving myself fully and lovingly to that work, I give myself fully to God. This happens not only in work but also in play, say, in bird-watching or in watching a good movie. God must be enjoying it in me, when I am enjoying it in God. Is not this communion the essence of praying?

— from the book The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life by Brother David Steindl-Rast