Tuesday, July 29, 2008

More of that paradox...

Do not place your happiness in what you can hear or feel of God in prayer but rather in what you can neither feel nor understand. God is always hidden and difficult to find. Go on serving God in this way, as though God were concealed in a sacred place, even when you think you have found God, felt God or heard God. The less you understand, the closer you get to God.

Prayer will teach you, too, that God is nearer to you than you are to yourself. After passing the fiery crucible and stepping through the narrow doorway where you can bring nothing with you, enter the cave of your heart that contains God, whom the universe cannot hold.

Pierre-Marie Delfieux - The Jerusalem Community Rule of Life, with thanks to Jan

 

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, with thanks to Inward/Outward

5 comments:

Ruth Hull Chatlien said...

The Merton quotation is very provocative. I wonder if I have found what my "one thing" is. Well, yes, I think I have. It is the vocation to write my fiction whether the world publishes it or not. Somehow being faithful to that gift makes all else possible.

Jan said...

The quotes go together well. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

I'm reading these words once again--and today I'm struck by how the Merton quote reminds me of last weekend's Gospel: "The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field."

Mike Farley said...

Funny thing, Missy, I was just thinking that myself!

Mike

Sue said...

What a beautiful combination of quotes. I was thinking earlier about how I love the space between two things just as much as I love the things. I love the space between these two quotations :)