Thursday, April 28, 2011

Dream Praying

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Last night I had a murky, scarcely rememberable dream--the one thing I can recall is praying, in the dream, (instead of "Lord, have mercy") "Lord, have mystery"!

But maybe there's really no difference between those two prayers!

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Saturday, April 9, 2011

The Size of the Kingdom

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It was on the twenty-third day of Adar that God bade Moses..."Gather thou all the congregation together unto the door of the Tabernacle."

At these last words Moses exclaimed: "O Lord of the world! How shall I be able to assemble before the door of the Tabernacle, a space that measures only two seah, sixty myriads of adult men and as many youths?"

But God answered: "Dost thou marvel at this? Greater miracles than this have I accomplished. The heaven was originally as thin and as small as the retina of the eye, still I caused it to stretch over all the world from one end to the other. In the future world, too, when all men from Adam to the time of the Resurrection will be assembled in Zion, and the multitude will be so great that one shall call to the other, 'The place is too strait for me, give place to me that I may dwell,' on that day will I so extend the holy city that all will conveniently find room there."

from Louis Ginzberg's LEGENDS OF THE BIBLE

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Thursday, April 7, 2011

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"He is closer to us than we are to ourselves, although we do not see Him.

...If He should teach us how to follow Him into the wilderness of His own freedom, we will no longer know where we are, because we are with Him who is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

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God approaches our minds by receding from them.

We can never fully know Him if we think of Him as an object of capture, to be fenced in by the enclosure of our own ideas.

We know Him better after our minds have let Him go.

The Lord travels in all directions at once.

The Lord arrives from all directions at once.

Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed.

Wherever we go, we discover that He has just arrived before us.

Our rest can be neither in the beginning of this pursuit, nor in the pursuit itself, nor in its apparent end. For the true end, which is Heaven, is an end without end. It is a totally new dimension, in which we come to rest in the secret that He must arrive at the moment of His departure; His arrival is at every moment and His departure is not fixed in time."

-Thomas Merton

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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Hearing Silence

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"He who possesses the word of Jesus is truly able to hear even His very silence, that he may be perfect, and may both act as he speaks, and be recognised by his silence. There is nothing which is hid from God, but our very secrets are near to Him. Let us therefore do all things as those who have Him dwelling in us, that we may be His temples,and He may be in us as our God, which indeed He is, and will manifest Himself before our faces. Wherefore we justly love Him."

-Ignatius of Antioch

"The relationship between Christ and His people is a substantial union--a union of our human nature with His resurrected and glorified human nature. This is not merely a moral union, a kind of pleasant fellowship with Christ. Baptism into Christ produces a dynamic union of substance with Him."

-OSB note p. 144

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