Quotes about Contemplation

We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.

But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." —2 Corinthians 3:16-18

Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity."10

Silence is not simply the absence of noise or the shutdown of communication with the outside world, but rather a process of coming to stillness.

A strange feeling comes over you, when you see the silent candle burning.

Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.

We have to keep asking ourselves: 'What does it all mean? What is God trying to tell us? How are we called to live in the midst of all this?' Without such questions our lives become numb and flat.

The great movement of the spiritual life is from a deaf, nonhearing life to a life of listening.

The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.

If I were to ask about my seven months at the Abbey, Did it work, did I solve my problems? the simple answer would be, It did not work, it did not solve my problems. And I know that a year, two years, or even a lifetime as a Trappist monk would not have worked either. Because a monastery is not built to solve problems but to praise the Lord in the midst of them.

When we are alone with God, the Spirit prays in us. The challenge is to develop a simple discipline or spiritual practice to embrace some empty time and empty space every day.

Silence is the discipline that helps us to go beyond the entertainment quality of our lives.