It is not seldom that our silence and our prayers do more to bring people to the knowledge of God than all our words about Him”
Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
Be a lover of silence
Many are avidly seeking but they alone find who remain in continual silence…Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within.
If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself.”
Isaac of Nineveh (quoted in Merton’s ‘Contemplative Prayer’)
Last orders
“Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?”
1 Corinthians 1:20
Yes indeed! And what an excellent job He has done. Here we are, masked like rabid dogs, falling for fear and division, and bending the collective knee to the most farcical of false narratives. The quicksands of worldly wisdom would have us descend into the darkest depths of untruth and wrongness. And yet in the timely spirit of polarisation, the tangle of deceit that has been woven through all sectors of society is becoming increasingly palpable.
It takes more than the burying of one’s head in the sand to ignore what is taking place. It requires the entombment of the entire body of logic, reason and common sense, as well as the abandonment of the organs of feeling and intuition. It seems to me that these choices extinguish the loving spark that is present within every individual, the one that invites each one of us to care about what is real and kindle the flame of what is good.
The wonderful unravelling is underway! Last chance to choose Truth. Last chance to get right with God. Last orders at the Fallen Earth Saloon.
Remember the everlasting covenant
"The rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." And God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between Me and all flesh that is on the earth."
Genesis 9:16-17
Frontiers
“Before we come to that which is unspeakable and unthinkable, the spirit hovers on the frontiers of language, wondering whether or not to stay on its own side of the border, in order to have something to bring back to other men. This is the test of those who wish to cross the frontier. If they are not ready to leave their own ideas and their own words behind them, they cannot travel further.”
Thomas Merton, No man Is an island
Hymn to matter – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock: you who yield only to violence, you who force us to work if we would eat. Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion: you who unless we fetter you will devour us. Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations: you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God. Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who, interposed between our minds and the world of essences, cause us to languish with the desire to pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.
Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day will undergo the process of dissolution within us and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart of that which exists. Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless."
From Hymn to the Universe by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Prepping for end times
Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”
Ephesians 14-18
Travel in darkness and uncertainty
Wherever we have some sign of God’s will, we are obliged to conform to what that sign tells us. We should do so with pure intention, obeying God’s will because it is good in itself as well as good for us.
It takes more than an occasional act of faith to have such pure intention. It takes a whole life of faith, a total consecration to hidden values. It takes sustained moral courage and heroic confidence in the help of divine grace.
But above all it takes the humility and spiritual poverty to travel in darkness and uncertainty, where so often we have no light and see no sign at all.
Thomas Merton, No man is an island
Because they do not know
If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me.
John 15:18-21
An act of war
I grow tired of the lies -
the personal, the protective,
the demonic, the divisive.
The tangle of deceit is apparent,
the diverting fictions cheapen,
the debauchery is ever more crude.
From the depths of the soul
there is clarity:
every thought turned to truth
is an act of war.
4th June 2020, Somerset, England.
Being a walking question mark 