I yearn to be in that place that offers isolation from the outside world, with a concentration on God through prayer and meditation.
I so long for the quiet, simple, contemplative life, but find myself in the midst of a demanding profession and a flurry of family, social and community activities.
I often jokingly tell my husband that I missed my calling as a nun in a contemplative order, but I know that this is of course exactly where God wants me to be.
My urge to write, to create, to express myself on all the pressing and not-so-preseing topics of the times is very strong. I realize this. I have a clear insight of this. I will set myself to writing about my conversion and what it meant, my pilgrimage through a modern world dedicated to war and destruction.
I have always thought that, beyond the depth of my new religious conviction, and its almost mystic nature (things that my brain for some reason does not allow me to comprehend fully), I am also looking for the discipline and the quiet, the forced focus that would enable me to write and write and write.
Like Merton, "What I needed was the solitude to expand in breadth and depth and to be simplified out under the gaze of God more or less the way a plant spreads out its leaves in the sun."
In prayer we seek God. We do not seek peace, quiet, tranquillity, enlightenment; we do not seek anything for ourselves. We seek to give ourselves, or, rather, we do simply give ourselves, even without attending to ourselves, so whole is our intent upon the one to whom we give: God. He is the all of our prayer. If thoughts and images and feelings careen around in our head and in our heart, little matter. We pay no attention to them. We do not seek to get rid of them any more than we seek to entertain them. As we give ourselves in our loving attention to God, we also give them to him. And let Him do with them what he wants to do with them.
And that is the point of
I so long for the quiet, simple, contemplative life, but find myself in the midst of a demanding profession and a flurry of family, social and community activities.
I often jokingly tell my husband that I missed my calling as a nun in a contemplative order, but I know that this is of course exactly where God wants me to be.
My urge to write, to create, to express myself on all the pressing and not-so-preseing topics of the times is very strong. I realize this. I have a clear insight of this. I will set myself to writing about my conversion and what it meant, my pilgrimage through a modern world dedicated to war and destruction.
I have always thought that, beyond the depth of my new religious conviction, and its almost mystic nature (things that my brain for some reason does not allow me to comprehend fully), I am also looking for the discipline and the quiet, the forced focus that would enable me to write and write and write.
Like Merton, "What I needed was the solitude to expand in breadth and depth and to be simplified out under the gaze of God more or less the way a plant spreads out its leaves in the sun."
In prayer we seek God. We do not seek peace, quiet, tranquillity, enlightenment; we do not seek anything for ourselves. We seek to give ourselves, or, rather, we do simply give ourselves, even without attending to ourselves, so whole is our intent upon the one to whom we give: God. He is the all of our prayer. If thoughts and images and feelings careen around in our head and in our heart, little matter. We pay no attention to them. We do not seek to get rid of them any more than we seek to entertain them. As we give ourselves in our loving attention to God, we also give them to him. And let Him do with them what he wants to do with them.
And that is the point of
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