As James Maxton cemented and grouted the seven angels, he underwent a spiritual transformation. A diabetic, coming off drugs, James suffered pain and swelling in his feet. He could only work three hours a day. Once every hour, he would limp back to his house and bathe his feet in ice. It wasn't until he completed the icons that James saw the beauty of what he had created. "I got all choked up," he says. "For me it was a spiritual awakening, just looking at them, seeing the people all around looking at the angels, too. I like to say I was reborn in that garden. It was my personal resurrection."

On Thee the Angels look and are at peace; that is why they have perfect bliss. They never can lose their blessedness, for they never can lose Thee. They have no anxiety, no misgivings -- because they love the Creator.

To evoke angels . . . we need only to live in quiet expectation of their presence and attune ourselves to their heedings. . . . From time to time, angels conceive and bring about serendipitous experiences and events in our lives to remind us that we are continually in God's care and that we are part of a divinely ordered universe.

We come to know the power of Silence
In deep meditation; here,
True Wisdom emerges silently,
Rising up from the Mystery
Of the unseen Source within all.

Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. . . . Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: "Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me." Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth. Silence is the sister of the divine.

Silence is the matrix from which word is born, the home to which word returns through understanding. Word (in contrast to chatter) does not break the silence.

In a genuine word, silence comes to word. In genuine understanding, word comes home into silence. For those who know only the world of words, silence is mere emptiness. But our silent heart knows the paradox: the emptiness of silence is inexhaustibly rich; all the words in the world are merely a trickle of its fullness.

May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us.

Lindbergh wrote more than fifty years ago, "Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions. Instead of stilling the center, the axis of the wheel, we add more centrifugal activities to our lives -- which tend to throw us off balance."

But our spirit has an instinct for silence. Every soul innately yearns for stillness, for a space, a garden where we can till, sow, reap, and rest, and by doing so come to a deeper sense of self and our place in the universe. Silence is not an absence but a presence. Not an emptiness but repletion. A filling up.

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. . . all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Coming to the red-brick church, we slip inside to rest, reflect, and lay prayerful hands on our ailing bodies. The sanctuary is empty. We sidle into pews, remove our hats, gloves, coats. Silence. Yank off our shoes. Silence.

Unlike the silence of a library with its absence of noise, of outward distractions, its rules and kindly librarians who shhhh! at you, in the empty church the silence is different. It's all about presence. Presence you can't name for what it truly is, can't see, but you can feel, if you bring your heart across the threshold of the outside world. This church could as easily be a synagogue, mosque, or a temple. There you meet yourself, and that inexpressible mystery that lies beyond you. This presence requires reverence, not obedience. We kneel at the shrine with no donation to make but our prayers -- for things beyond words, prayers of the open heart. This silence is alive, making possible a change. Silence

The task of the peacemaker is to speak the truth, whether our culture wants to hear it or not. As we speak the truth in a spirit of love and peace, we will realize deeper levels of truth and begin to understand the great truth of human unity and God’s way of nonviolence. The pursuit of truth ultimately is the pursuit of God.

Trust that truth whether good or bad, pretty or ugly, is
still truth . . . the knowledge of anything true brings
freedom and empowerment back to oneself.

Happy are those who, while possessing the truth, search more earnestly for it in order to renew it, deepen it, and transmit it to others. Happy also are those who, not having found truth, are working toward it with a sincere heart.

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from
outward things, what e’er you may believe.
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness . . . and to know,
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
supposed to be without.

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant,
never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the
devotion of which the human spirit is capable.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth.

When Henry wove a rug, he wove from the depths of his spirit and from the fullness of his heart, and with the careful eye of a focused mind.  Directly across from his upright loom, at eye level on the concave wall of the hut, Henry had lettered a small sign for his own inspiration: BY THEIR WORKS YE SHALL KNOW THEM.  And more, it was a reminder that his remission from consumption, he believed, had come as a consequence of work with his hands.  Work for him was the very stuff of salvation and healing.  For that reason, whenever he should write or type or spell the word "work" for any reason, he would use an uppercase "W" as its beginning.
 

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

If we open up to our vitality and to the sense of urgency that flows within us, we will have the pleasure of experiencing ourselves living and working in cooperation with the deepest forces of life.
 

If only he could work faster.  Yet if he did work faster, how could he produce paintings grounded in deep beds of contemplation, the only way living things could be stilled long enough to understand them?  And wasn't everything he painted--a breadbasket, a pitcher, a jewelry box, a copper pan--wasn’t it all living?
 

To do work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself with God's will in my work.  I become an instrument for God to work through me.
 

Ludmilla taught me that we can pray anywhere, during any kind of work that is being done attentively and well and to the best of our ability.  In such work, God is present.  We only have to know this and try to give it our heart.  Many people wish to have spiritual development without obstacles or even effort, and so they will never understand God’s love or the poverty of our humanity.
 

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.
 

Much of life…is about awakening to the interior experience.  In our day-to-day living, we come to see how all of our physical journeying is not simply a temporal exercise, a transitory, earthly trek, but increasingly points to a shared and liberating inner passage . . .  As Christianity and all the great religious traditions of the world testify, our surface-level living is the symbolic acting out of a deep inward pilgrimage leading to -- and beyond -- the gates of the heart.