Whatever It Is You're Seeking ....

crashinglybeautiful:

Paramahansa Yogananda. A great photo. Thank you, towardtheone & buffleheadcabin.

* *

“Silence as a spiritual practice is much more than being able to sit still without talking for thirty minutes or longer. Instead, silence is a quality of presence. The silence we search for is an overall state of being. it is not something we achieve with great effort, either, but something we uncover that is inside us. Somewhere at our core there is a reservoir of silence . . . To return regularly to this depth, whether in cloistered silence or in line at the grocery, is called “a habit of silence.” It is not duration that is important, but the returning time after time to the source within us that, in time, shapes who we are.”

--Marv Hiles, in “The Way Through” No 37, Spring 2011 [thanks to "Friends of Silence"]

* *

Another word to describe mystical moments is emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of newfound freedom, I don’t think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than we imagined, expected, or even hoped. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether the practices, sermons, sacraments, or liturgies are opening them to an authentic God experience.

All of these words describe mystical moments: enlargement, connection or union, and emancipation. You may not use the same words, but on a practical level mysticism is experienced as a new capacity and a new desire to love. And you wonder where it comes from. Why do I have this new desire, this new capacity to love some new people, to love the old people better, maybe to enter into some kind of new love for the world? I even find my thoughts are more immediately loving.

Clearly, you are participating in a love that’s being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself, and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.

Richard Rohr: From Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate …
Seeing God in All Things (CD, DVD, MP3)

* *

The cross is how to work for the answer without becoming part of the problem. The cross is about how to stand against hate without becoming hate yourself. How can you stand against hate without letting it frame the question? How do we oppose the evil, the hurts, the betrayals, the abandonment, the rejections, and the disappointments in our lives, the people who let us down, the people who turn against us, and the people who tell lies about us? How do we stand against that in a way that we do not become a mirror image of the same thing? In the end, this is the essential spiritual question.

The cross is a geometric image that you can hold onto and draw life from, a visual metaphor for the paradoxical nature or cruciform pattern of reality. Reality is filled with contradictions. Jesus was killed on the collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests and half-truths that all of life is. The people who live and hold the contradictions, in fact, are the saviors of the world! These are the people who are the agents of all true transformation, reconciliation and newness.

Richard Rohr: Adapted from Hope Against Darkness:
The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 33-34

* *
“Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting. - Haruki Murakami”

—	Twitter / Search - riskywiver

* *