“The heart isn’t interested in knowing. The heart is interested in awareness….Knowing contains within it a very heavy charge of rightness and wrongness. Everything we know has to do with being right and being wrong….
Awareness has nothing to do with being right or wrong. The heart is aware. The mind may or not know that there are people suffering in Ethiopia this minute. But the heart is aware. Always. Of everything.”
“One thing I do want to say; and if this doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable, then I’m doing something wrong:
Our Lord never ever asked us to be right. He asked us to be good. And yet we spend 99.9% of our religious lives, and 101% of our political lives trying to be right. Jesus doesn’t mind if we’re right or not. He does mind if we’re good or not.”
“Language. Some language is beautiful, some language is horrid. We have poets in our presence. No one here would deny that some language is very beautiful; but we also know that language can convey the basest, the nastiest, the most vile sentiments that human beings can inflict upon each other. Hatred. Torture.
They’re all based in language.
The mind knows language.
The heart knows silence.”
“St. Maximus the Confessor said something along these lines:
Silence is the language of God. Everything else is a mistranslation.
I’m not here talking about empty silence. But about God-filled silence–the natural silence that exists in you this minute, right now, right here which is available to you whenever you choose to reach out for it. It’s not an empty silence, it’s not
a barren silence or a cold silence, or a dark silence; it is a warm, God-filled, beautiful, expressive silence.
And it resides in your heart all the time. And it doesn’t take much–once you know it’s there–to find it.”
Fr. Meletios
From:Audo Lectures given at 2004 Eagle River Institute
Mind and the Heart in our Spiritual Life
h/t: by the narrow gate
photo:Chair-demost1967
photo: Madonna-demost1967
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