Reflections

Illuminated by a near-full moon, several women and I made our way along a forested lakeshore across from a Midwestern Benedictine monastery. We had crept out that night to extend our Wisdom School lessons in intentional living to the serious work of play. A half hour of twisting climbs and descents brought us to a rustic altar and wooden benches that the monks had built high on a rocky outcropping. There we stripped to skin, scrabbled down, and leapt into black silky folds of water...

By Barbara Cecil I write to fellow travelers, who, like me, are wending their way into the living heart of silence…to women and men of all ages from far and wide, who are drawn to an inner stability that is not subject to the tempest of these times…  to those opening their lives to a creative force awaiting expression just behind chaos and disturbance.  I offer a few stories (out of untold myriads that could be highlighted) about ways an abiding ocean of latent potential, born in silence,...

Over the centuries, people just like us – ordinary, wise, imperfect – have found themselves in similar trouble:  doubting ways of knowing that had once felt dependable and secure, and yet becoming reticent when the lay of the land changed.  Often without warning, people just like us find themselves on a threatening road, so incomprehensible that they cannot fathom its boundaries....

I was touched by how Heather Ruce opened the daily Pause of meditation and Centering Prayer earlier this month.  She spoke of a great wave surrounding us, permeating us, which is itself the flow of God. The name God is shorthand (a nickname) for this unfathomable, ever-present, source of love.  More and more, as the disconnected world we have constructed collapses, I find myself orienting deliberately in this pervasive energy...

Many have said that this Advent feels different. The soft hopefulness diminished, the growing light muted. Instead a cavern of tangled serpents seems to be at our feet.  A roiling world with dragons all around...