This is then what it means to seek God perfectly:
to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display;
to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will;
to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God;
to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love;
to love all men as myself;
to rest in humility and to find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other men;
to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions that I have no burden to carry;
to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him;
to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God,
to do His will.
And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things.
"It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God." Lamentations 3:26
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Great! :) :) :) :) :) :)
ReplyDeleteWhile I can appreciate the eloquence and depth of these sorts of mystical reflections, I personally encounter difficulty in applying them to life. The mystical lifestyle appears to constitute an implicit withdrawal from the world, at least psychologically or spiritually. If that is indeed the case, that withdrawal makes it more difficult to connect these esoteric spiritual experiences with the more mundane spiritual reality that most people live within. In other words, I find it difficult to derive a simple program of action from these types of reflections.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I misunderstand them.
I wrote a post to reply to your comment Siv :o)
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