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When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”
Whenever we come under the sway of those inner forces that censure and fragment us, we become progressively disconnected
from how we really feel, from the passionate voice of our heart. We rust over. There comes a time in life when, like Dorothy, we need to run for the oil can.
I tried to watch, to be attentive, to love and be present to God, creation, my own aliveness, even the holiness of an owl’s call.
When we, like Mary, sit in a pool of divine presence, our hearts full and attentive in the midst of our darkness and pain, we’re praying ourselves
into new creatures; we’re dwelling in the cocoon. Our very posture says, I love you, God.
This posture of dependency and trust can be glimpsed not only in Bartimaeus waiting on the road but in the Israelites waiting in the desert (Exod. 16).
rehearsal. This is it. Live it now! We spend time reliving history or devising the future much more than we think. Some of that is important, but when we “live” in those realms, investing most of our consciousness there, we don’t dwell in the present moment in a deep way. We lose touch with the nowness of life; we lose touch with soul.
It routed my ego-dominated need to think mostly in terms of memory and anticipation and taught me to be where I was, taught me that time isn’t a straight line along which we travel, but a deep dot in which we dwell.
The present moment becomes the Communion bread that’s broken to reveal the presence of Christ.
We have a grasp of outer things. We know the “right” answers, the “correct” lines, the “proper” behavior and wording for life. We live by rote, mouthing the words, unaware of the depth of melody flowing inside. At this level we tend to live by time, so mired in chronos that we don’t even realize that there’s kairos in the world.
the aim of the spiritual life is finding union with God through contemplation of everything around you, and then of divinity. “This is the God-life in the here and now,” he said. “It breaks in upon us. Our hope is to make it more and more continuous.”
