A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation

that power which is both everywhere and yet nowhere,

the opposite of the contemplative life is not the active life but the reactive life: highly habituated emotional styles and lifestyles that keep us constantly reacting to life like victimizing victims, ever more convinced that the videos that dominate and shape our awareness are in fact true.

Saint Teresa wants to suggest that the manner in which we pray formal, vocal prayers changes and becomes the very doorway through which we move into the silence of contemplation.

the pathless path of prayer knows only how to move through struggle; and the only way through is through—not around, over, under, or alongside, but through.

Only the person who has renounced obsessive thoughts is a true monk.”

The sculptor imposes nothing but only frees what is held captive in stone. The practice of contemplation is something like this. It does not work by means of addition or acquisition, but by release, chiseling away thought-shackled illusions of separation from God.

I have not met one dedicated person of prayer who walks a very dry, dark path who does not embody many of the cardinal and theological virtues, as well as many of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.13 By contrast I know many who have had quite explicit contemplative experiences yet have not integrated these experiences into a life of living faith and lov

If God is the sculptor, our practice is like a chisel that works effectively and patiently to remove stone.

To get caught up in a buzzing commentary on how irritating the noise is makes for a noisy relationship with noise.

ideally we nourish our bodies every day and so likewise we should nourish our spirit.