HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

Silence is the language of God. Everything else is a mistranslation

“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

 

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love...

 
      
Faith Healing
      
      Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice -

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them - that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

Philip Larkin

Photo: Elena Baca

Tears, Silence and the Body Ceases. Did you come to Bury my Pip?

 

This will be the sign for you when you have drawn near to entering into that region [of truth]. When grace has begun to open your eyes to perceive an exact vision of these things, then your eyes will begin to shed tears until your cheeks are washed by their abundance, and the fervor of the senses will be slowed that they may profitably be restrained within you. If there is one who teaches you other than this, do not believe him. But you are not permitted to seek another indication from the body besides tears as a manifest sign of the perception of truth, unless in the silence of the activity of the members of the body. This happens when the mind is raised above existing things, and the body ceases from tears and perception and any movement except physical vitality.

St. Isaac of Nineveh,

photo by: Sator Arepo [out for vacation] The shadow side

What I Haven't Been Able To Write Or Say

I don't see or speak with people too often

I need so much time, space to process

All the chaos that swirls and bounces in my head

I need to be undisturbed, quiet, still

giving them time for them to light

to settle, then to observe, and maybe discern a pattern

The slightest thing startles and scatters the feathered thoughts

and sets them flying, floating in all directions

the pattern unrepeatable

and some pieces, never return again

the next wholeness is always less with each fright

i can’t say what I want to say

There is a well of Acceptable Words

A different set for this person, that setting, that situation

And what i still have is Shrinking, Fading, Narrowing

The well is running dry

Until all the Words, in all the Places

Soon, Soon Soon,

all will be dried up.

And I don't expect rain anytime soon

Some places, the dew is all that wets my lips

Others, the well is already dry

i speak only silence

And i am left at the bottom of the well, alone

With the Silence of all the Words i can't speak

Echoing, ricocheting off the thick walls

Making a Noisome Pestilence

Who hears?

Who will calm the storm?

What i hear is what everyone could hear,

But work so hard not to;

Desperately doing anything to drown it out

Chatter, distraction,  self inflicted deafness

If one will only be still, wait

If one listens, it can be heard

if they choose;

If

Who hears?

Who can calm the storm.

photo:Santa Fe, 2008

Do you not know that your body is a temple....

We thought of finding God where the body ends:
and we made the body suffer and we turn it into a heavy load,
an obedient entity, a machine of work, into an enemy to be silenced,
and that way we persecuted the body to the point of praising death
as a the way to God, as if God preferred the smell of sepulchres
to the delights of paradise.
And we became cruel, violent, allowing exploration and war.

For, if God can only be found beyond the body, then everything
can be done to the body

Alves, Rubem.
1983. Creio na Ressurreição do Corpo.
Rio de Janeiro: Cedi.