I’m preparing a lesson to share on the topic of wisdom this weekend. In the process, I came across this helpful bit of advice from Sam Levenson:
It’s so simple to be wise.
Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.
So that’s what I’ll try to do. Thanks Sam.
That IS simple.
Benedict Auer wrote this little piece:
“In the film Dead Poets Society, a student pretends to get a phone call during morning assembly. When the phone rings, he answers it and tells the headmaster that it is God calling. I have spent the majority of my life waiting for that ring, putting my life on hold, sitting through sleepless nights waiting, as if for Godot, but I only get wrong numbers or solicitors. Each ring I anticipate a divine voice, hoping beyond hope that this time it is God, but then it is a lonely voice or a distraught student, and again I missed God.
Or did I?
I wonder if maybe I have heard from God but just haven’t recognised the voice.”
Or as Meister Eckhart puts it:
“God is always at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.”
An unknown writer shared this about the power that silence and solitude can have within spiritual life:
“There is exterior silence and interior silence. The monastery is, or should be, a place of at least relative silence in the sense of the absence of unnecessary noise and agitated movement. We are less assaulted by harsh sounds; rather we are soothed by the mostly harmonious sounds of nature, and bells and our Gregorian chant. This pacifies our sensibility and refines it. A heightened awareness is a common experience in solitude and affects all the senses, for they are all linked together.
In silence we are more vividly aware of colour, and perfume and touch, because we are more present to ourselves. And little by little, we become attuned to the breathing spaces of silence between the sounds, as it were, like an underlying melody, not exactly ‘heard’, and yet somehow perceived, something that can take the character of a presence.
Silence begets an attitude of listening. The artist, the philosopher, the praying person may perceive or, at least, express in different words diverse aspects of this reality, but all have need of silence, receptivity, and awareness.”
Unnecessary noise and agitated movement… if only this stuff were relevant to “here and now”, eh?!
Becoming attuned to the “breathing spaces of silence between the sounds”… LOVE that phrase. I’ve heard that the difference between surviving or perishing in a pile of rubble (earthquake or whatever) is often whether a victim has access to a “breathing space” or not. Not hard to run with that illustration, is it?
Receptivity and awareness… I always need more of both. Might some silent solitude be in order?
This powerful bit comes from Joan Chittister. If we’re free to choose our spiritual mentors, I use one of my top picks to select her.
“When the monastic makes a vow of stability it is a vow designed to still the wandering heart. There comes a time in life when everyone else’s family seems to have been better than my own. There comes a moment when having everything seems to be the only way to squeeze even a little out of life. There comes a day when this job, this home, this town, this family all seem irritating and deficient beyond the bearable. There comes a period in life when I regret every major decision I’ve ever made. That is precisely the time when the spirituality of stability offers its greatest gift.
Stability enables me to outlast the dark, cold places of life until the thaw comes and I can see new life in this uninhabitable place again.
But for that to happen I must learn to wait through the winters of my life.“
THOSE moments… I know them.
Winters of life… I’ve had those.
Stability… I seek that.
Morning reading led me to the words of Karl Adam.
If you’ve ever wondered who you are, as one of the six billion people currently inhabiting our planet, he puts this out there:
“Man is a mystery. He is the culmination-point of an eternal love which issues from God; a point in the actuality of the world where, as nowhere else, the love of God burns.”
YOU and your life are a point where the love of God burns with a unique flame.
Words like that can change a life.
So take that with you as you walk today.