What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, intelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen.
There has to be enough communication so that silence can be a grace. That kind of silence demands a deeper love, and until that much love is developed, there is no point in pretending that the love is there when it isn't. The justification of silence in our life is that we love one another to be silent together ... In the depths of community life, we realize the grace of being silent together, but we don't arrive at this by excluding others or treating them as objects. It happens gradually as we learn to love ... The need is for a true silence which is alive and which carries a loving presence.
Silence is the strength of our interior life. If we fill our lives with silence, then we live in hope.
Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware, that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source.
No escape from paradox: Wisdom manifests itself, and is yet hidden. The more it hides, the more it is manifest; and the more it is manifest, the more it is hidden. For God is known when apprehended as unknown, and is heard when we realize that we do not know the sounds of God's voice. The words uttered are words of full silence, and they are bait to draw us into silence. The truths manifested are full of hiddenness, and their function is to hide us, with themselves, in God from whom they proceed. If we hide the precepts of wisdom in our heart -- precepts of humility, meekness, charity, renunciation, faith, prayer -- they themselves will hide us in God. For the values which they give to us, are completely hidden from our eyes. They bring us to the source of a life that is unknown to the natural wisdom of the world, and yet from this source of nature itself proceeds, is nourished, and is sustained.
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all living things which are all part of one another and involved in one another.
It is absurd to talk about interior silence when there is no exterior silence.
If we would return to God, and find ourselves in God, we must reverse Adam and Eve's journey, we must go back by the way they came. The path lies through the center of our own soul. Adam and Eve withdrew into themselves from God and then passed through themselves and went forth into creation. We must withdraw ourselves from exterior things, and pass through the center of our souls to find God. We must recover possession of our true selves by liberation from anxiety and fear and inordinate desire.
There must be a time of day when we who make plans forget our plans and act as if we had no plans at all. There must be a time of day that when we have to speak, we fall very silent ... and our mind forms no more propositions, and we ask: Did they have a meaning? There must be a time when we who pray go to our prayer as if it were the first time in our life that we had ever prayed; when we of resolutions put our resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and we learn a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.