A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation

“We are not referring to some dark corner, but to a vast inner space.”6 According to St. Augustine, this vast inner space of the soul, an “abyss” as he terms it, is completely open and porous to God: “Indeed, Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is naked.”

Contemplation is the soul’s Copernican revolution.

Saint John of the Cross stated it as simply as he could: “The soul’s center is God.”

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

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

Boredom heals by diminishing our reliance on this spiritual glitz that keeps us preoccupied with how our prayer is progressing.

because the thinking mind so dominates, there can be a bit of stiffness as it opens. This stiffness registers in the mind as boredom. With nothing for the grasping mind to do, it feels bored or even anxious.

Literally “compassion” means to feel with. The word betokens more a felt solidarity with a person than positive feelings for a particular person.

He tells us to “picture ourselves aboard a boat. There are ropes joining it to some rock. We take hold of the rope and pull on it as if we were trying to drag the rock to us when in fact we are hauling ourselves and our boat toward that rock.”