It is as if God planted a great big kiss in the middle of our spirit and all the wounds, doubts, and guilt feelings were healed at the same moment. The experience of being loved by the Ultimate Mystery banishes every fear.
Seekers are people of faith even if they do not belong to a particular religion. Faith in this sense is deeper than one’s belief system. Belief systems belong to the level of pluralism; faith to the level of unity. Faith is constitutive of human nature itself. It is openness to Ultimate Mystery before it is broken down into various belief systems. It is the acceptance of authentic living with all its creativity and the acceptance of dying with its potential for a greater fullness of life.
When all striving ceases
I awaken to behold
Ever-present Awareness
Keeping silent watch.
We may enjoy an experience of God that is so delightful that we may think all our troubles are over and we have at last completed the journey. Then after a few hours or a few days we find ourselves on the spiral staircase again and cannot even remember the pleasures of that transient experience of divine union. The whole purpose of this alternation is to bring the soul to the total transformation of love.
God is everywhere. The animals and flowers all manifest God's presence, as does the marvelous ecological balance we're becoming more aware of in recent times. Everything seems to work together over time to produce a certain consciousness of God's presence.
Love has given humans very real gifts. The chief one is the divine indwelling, God's own presence within us, sustaining us by this creative action and embracing us, or trying to heal or transform us through the redeeming love that is distinctively motherly. As the spiritual journey progresses, one comes face to face with the divine presence.
The ordinary circumstances of daily life bring back the same routines, and often the sense of going nowhere! But "nowhere" is where God is most active. God and daily life are always in dialogue and sometimes in a state of war. There is a struggle to figure out what god is saying in the events and circumstances of daily life and how daily life is meant to transform us... Listening to God in silent loving attentiveness, enables us to let go of our preconceptions and over-identifications with the events of daily life, which tends to dominate our emotional reactions rather than invite our free response.
Contemplative prayer is not a conversation in words, but an exchange of hearts.
There came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. ~ I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence ~ that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all: That the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love.