Tag Archives: stillness

Seeking God.

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As we seek after God, what we know will lead us. Even if we start with God is Love, our experience of love will form our thoughts. If our confidence starts with the assertion that what is revealed in the scriptures is sufficient for us to trust God and the promise of God found there is true, who we are in our reading will dictate our path to seeking the Holy.

Holy means beyond knowing yet close, a place of presence, an encounter with mystery. Both love and holiness are the exercise of goodness. Love wills the good and holiness is presence of good. Again our culture and experience, our character and history will define our experience.

That is why I believe silence and stillness to be part of our quest after the divine. That’s why I believe that faith begins with the appreciation of beauty, goodness and justice. What warms our hearts in the moment, what blazes unexpectedly, the arresting presence is the beginning and end of faith. The faithfulness of God in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus are my beginning and the stillnes and silence strip away the rest, all other thought is purified by the presence of the mystery of the birth, death and resurrection of God in Christ.

The experience that defines our quest after the knowledge of the Holy begins with encountering the end of experience, declaring, here I am before the person and voice of God speaking into our need to know.

A call to practice.

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To find stillness, to rest in who we are, to know ourselves… As we rest and everything falls away, we find the good; we are resting in our being, our wellbeing. In all circumstances, for a moment, we can know good. For a moment we are found.

In our knowing we find ourselves in the presence of a person beyond knowing; a person beyond naming. The moment is not empty, and we know goodness.

To find the stillness we need to stop and open our eyes, stop and listen. The stillness creates longing and draws us to good. We are filled to will the good in every circumstance, called to the fulfilment of all good. As we become aware, all attachments fall away; everything that binds us becomes plain and we find the beginning and end of all things. And so wholeness is opened to us.

In Christ this wholeness is named, the beginning and the end, who teaches us to call the one beyond knowing, Father.

For this he died and in him we die to all our lacks, all our attachments, all our false hopes, as we trust in his goodness, his loving embrace.

We are not ashamed of this good news of grace. In the moment, in all circumstances, though we are of the soil and to the soil we will return, we find wisdom. Our senses are alive and life calls us to be fruitful, to draw from the fount of all being, draw from the living wellspring, draw from Christ, and filled, pour ourselves out.

In this being, all is redeemed, all pain, all suffering, every tear is grounded in joy, earthed in a radical sense of purpose: to love.

Come Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us!