An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

Reactive mind is characterized by a compulsion to acquire as well as a throttling need to progress toward mastery. It is what we embarrassingly call our normal way of life, shaped by a culture that feeds on compulsion, consumption, conquest, credit, and cash.

Devotion can certainly play a positive role in the practice of contemplation, but it differs from the silence of simple reverence.

what is important is the weaponry of the demons: afflictive thoughts (in Greek, logismoi).

at some moment, when we spontaneously stopped looking at ourselves as objects of fascination, we cease using the practice of contemplation as a means of controlling any aspect of our progress in contemplation. Each time we sit, it is as though for the very first time and we are too innocent to expect anything at all.

The sheer generosity of receptive mind continues its expanse, an expanse generous enough to cradle in its arms the joys and burdens of a lifetime. Pain still hurts. Joy still gladdens. Despair still flattens. But we are less demanding that the present moment—whether pain, boredom, or bliss—be other than it happens to be.

Martin Laird, O.S.A., “Continually Breathe Jesus Christ: Stillness and Watchfulness in the Philokalia,” Communio 34 (2007): 243–263.

What we alone can do we cannot do alone.

who are we to invite God in, who is already the very ground of our seeking? God is the great invitation—an invitation to release perpetually into that Love which finds Sabbath rest in us and sustains us in being.

Through the medicine of grace, the eye of our heart is healed by the gradual removal of the lumber of mental clutter, “the plank in our eye” that obscures the radiance of the heart. This radiance is a ray of God’s own light.