Why do we rush about… looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?”

Silence is living, dynamic, and liberating. The practice of silence nourishes vigilance, self-knowledge, letting go, and the compassionate embrace of all whom we would otherwise be quick to condemn.

Divine love is forgiving love. Sorrow must be allowed to blossom into self-forgetful love of God.

One need not have journeyed too far into this silent land to realize that the so-called psychological self, our personality (not what Paul is talking about as hidden with Christ in God) is a cognitive construct pasted up out of thoughts and feelings. A rather elaborate job has been done of it, and it is singularly useful. But our deepest identity,

that is the ground of even our wounds, is that we easily get caught in judging our own faults and failings. By this I do not mean we should not be able to admit fault, confess failings, make amends. Indeed we should. I’m saying that we get caught in this.

precisely because we think our lives, think our spirituality, think about God, we end up perceiving God as some “thing” over there, some cause among many other causes of things.

We must long for truth, freedom, loving communion with the silent depths of God.

From this depth God is seen to be the ground of both peace and chaos, one with ourselves and one with all the world, the ground “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

A branch is a branch insofar as it is one with the vine. From the branch’s perspective it is all vine.