“Just as there are those things that lose their sweet scent as soon as they are exposed to the air, there are also thoughts of the soul that cannot be interpreted in the language of the earth without losing their intimate and heavenly feeling” – St. Therese of Lisieux the Little Flower
“You will never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself” – Anthony De Mello
“There is a way between voice and presence where information flows. In disciplined silence it opens. With wandering talk it closes.” - Rumi
There is nothing to say about the silence in which Christ (as I call God and you may call whatever) comes to scour our imperfections and cleanse our souls; I can only speak of the fact that He prepares, and again warn you against trying to prepare yourself at all.
“People who are converted on the basis of self-hatred and self-dissatisfaction are impossible to live with.” – Anthony De Mello
But I am nobody to do this in truth, just a mouth box for those wiser ones who’ve said these things for centuries more eloquently. So listen here only to get a fly-by of what those with authority have said and please forget me. I wish I could forget myself for you!
What is the final “goal” to all this awareness, and observance, and silence? Isn’t it redemption or the process? Which is in itself the redemption on this earth? For us to be quiet enough to allow our hearts to be revived?
“By like melting snow/ wash yourself of yourself” - Rumi
The following is one of many great depictions of this Truth from the Christian Gospels; one easy for my idiot hand to translate this spirituality which set fire to my dead and dying heart; for that was all I’ve wanted to share with these articles and hope to help you experience as well (that’s what revived hearts do by their nature I am told and it seems true); but I cannot know, maybe it was, and is, selfish vanity and personal will? I have many imperfections and hope Christ comes to clean them all as I wait upon his timing. Forgive me in advance if I was wrong in sharing this and I pray that you are still able to see God through what may have been born of selfish vanity and personal will.
This scene includes Christ, John and two of John’s disciples.
“The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means teacher), “where are you staying?”
He said to them, “Come, and you will see.” – John 37-39a
God (call it what you want) knows what we are looking for, but we don’t need a direct answer from him lest we walk away like the rich man with a broken heart (Mathew 19:22) – rather we must go be with him. Actually spend time with him and learn to live with him.
His only answer to us is “Come, and you will see.” Its beauty will make the dirtiest ego cry if God sees it fit to give it the grace to receive this consolation! I promise, for I am so sick that I have these consolations! Just re-reading it know I experience its reality and am moved to a blubbering fool typing through a hazy wet lens. I hope you are given this pleasure! But maybe it is only for us so sickly.
There is no other way to accurately say this. You just have to experience it. Like with people right? I can’t say whom you are, only things about you, to really know anything of you I have to be around you – experience you in the fresh reality of every moment without my own conceptual lenses generally built on fear (which is our sin).
“I need a mouth as wide as the sky to say the True Nature of a person” - Rumi
Did you know the most used phrase in the Bible is “Do not fear?” – said 366 times? One for every day including leap years if you’re into numbers – and until I was blessed by trial to be silent, this fact stayed in my head as a beautiful truth I’d happily share; but it’s seed actually sprouted fruit when it became more wonderful in the reality of the heart– and that is what sets a heart afire; that is what neither I, nor anyone before me can describe. Like Aquinas says, “the best we know of God is that we can know nothing of God” (paraphrase from memory from the Summa).
“The concept always misses or omits something extremely important, something precious that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness.” – Anthony De Mello
This will change your very atoms I swear, you will become brand new and it may overwhelm you at times- it does me; but even that is grace from “Gods Creative Hand” – Rumi
“Behold, I make all things new” – Revelation 21:5
So I’m sorry that I cannot say anymore, or am choosing not to say anymore about these things directly and pray to speak little of it hereafter. Truly the best I can do is relay what I was graced to behold and try and use the same spirit to point to the same reality; and that reality is that which cannot be expressed, but that we must go, and see.
I’m sorry for not having anything more concrete only because I know it is what we all desire for the comfort we feel after taking it in our minds - but I promise you as one being torn apart willingly that if I gave you anything concrete I would be doing you a great disservice and making a liar of myself for giving to my false nature. That would be to please me (and give you something comforting) versus doing what is most loving on behalf of the Christ in me (in us) who grows every moment we allow him to.
“For through the law I died to the law, that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.” – Galatians 2:19-20
To be clear, this is a perpetual crucifixion (and resurrection!); but that you allow it to start (which is the grace shown often through trials) God (call it what you want) will take all the rest of the steps in you to “let life live in you” – De Mello. Once we start, the suffering is our pleasure for how much it may be suffering.
I don’t know my friends, maybe this was all too much too. I will try to say no more on this for I can do nothing else for you but maybe be around you sometime and “come and see” Christ in you as you “come and see” Christ in me.
I will leave you with some quotes that helped me open up and prepared me for the ongoing process of salvation by God’s creative hand. I love very much, as you do; so may we be able to release the utter fullness of this love from our hearts for the sake of God as nothing brings him more joy and nothing is more our most basic and holy function.
Love,
Karan
“There are things that the heart feels, but that words and even thoughts cant manage to express…” - St. Therese
“The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know” - Pascal
“…not so much about anything as spoken from within something” – Coleman Barks
“But who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?” - Rumi
“The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there you’ve got to intuit or experience it directly.” - Anthony De Mello
“Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
Widening rings of being.” - Rumi
“In this solitude your dependence dies. Your capacity to love is born.” – Anthony De Mello
“Life only makes sense when you think of it as a mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind” – Anthony De Mello
“Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged. That is extremely important for the process of change.” - Anthony De Mello
“If worship isn’t leading to the fire, if adoration isn’t leading to love, if the liturgy isn’t leading to a clearer perception of reality, if God isn’t leading to life, of what use is religion except to create more division, more fanaticism, more antagonism?” – Anthony De Mello
“The root of evil is within you. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself and you understand.” – Anthony De Mello
“Thirst drove me down to the water
Where I drank the moon’s reflection.
Now I am a lion staring up totally
Lost in love with the thing itself.” – Rumi
I’m sorry to you my fellow suffering, that we may be around each other to experience Christ’s love I pray- that we may experience Christ’s love even apart I pray. But I pray heartily to go tenderly forward in God’s time with all things made new by He who is who He is (paraphrase Exodus 3:14)
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