Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation

“The impulse to sin always brings great benefit for someone who is righteous.”6 By “righteous” Eckhart does not mean a moral know-it-all, but a flowering of personal integrity that is characterized by ever-deepening immersion in God and in self-forgetful service to others.

We should always be wary of applying linear notions of progress to our prayer life and asking ourselves: “What stage am I in?” “How far have I progressed?” Whatever “progress” in prayer is supposed to mean, it certainly doesn’t work like that.

This simple practice that Laura learned is an ancient contemplative practice called vigilance or watchfulness. Remember Evagrius’s instruction: “Let him keep careful watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity, their periods of decline and follow them as they rise and fall.”

differentiating union: the more we realize we are one with God the more we become ourselves, just as we are, just as we were created to be. The Creator is outpouring love, the creation, the love outpoured.

an ancient Christian view that the foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18:14), where God simply and perpetually gives Himself, This Self-gift is manifested in the creation, in the people of God and their inspired (if stumbling) pursuit of a just society, and most fully, in the Christian view of things, in Jesus Christ.

But even with the most halting of footsteps in the silent land, we see that judging others really is not about our perceptions and assessments of others, but the way in which the jaws of our convictions lock so tightly around people that we actually think we know what life is like for them, what they really ought to do or think, as though we know t

Here at the Second Doorway it is important to meet the judging thought directly, before it whips up a story about frustration or boredom. Meet it with silence. Like most distracting thoughts, it will not survive the direct meeting of a steady, silent gaze.

awareness as simple, spacious immersion in God gets refracted as the search for God-as-object-to-be-acquired.

takes less than a minute of attempting to practice inner stillness to realize that however fidgety the body may be the real obstacle to inner silence is the mind.