Hidden Contemplatives: Withdraw yourself from all care

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Withdraw yourself from all care

Withdraw Yourself

Presence speaks in many wordless ways. The events of our life as they unfold are the clearest words. Life is endlessly speaking wisdom into our hearts. Life is challenging us to allow even greater ease, even greater freedom, disguised as hardship and limitation. Once allowing is allowed, it presents our deepest places yet longing for freedom, longing to be allowed. Present all to the Presence that breathes wisdom and clarity into our being. We will know what to say when the time is right.

Withdraw yourself from all care; trust not in yourself but in Him; do not be anxious or solicitous to perform great works for Him until He leads you Himself, by obedience and love and the events which His providence directs, to undertake the works He has planned for you and by which He will use you to communicate the fire of His love to other men.

Thomas Merton

Hidden Contemplatives

"There are many .... who serve God with great purity of soul and perfect self-sacrifice in the active life. They know how to find God by devoting themselves to him in self-sacrificing labors in which they are able to remain in His presence all day long.

They lead lives of great simplicity. Without realizing it, their extremely simple prayer is, for them, so deep and interior that it brings them to the threshold of contemplation.

Although they are active labourers, they are also hidden contemplatives because of the great purity of heart maintained in them by obedience, fraternal charity, self-sacrifice, and perfect abandonment to God's will in all that they do and suffer."

Thomas Merton

Profile

Anne Marie Maguire is a T'ai Chi and Qigong teacher, Herbalist and Naturopath, with special interests in the mystical traditions, energetics, plant medicine, and the inherent rhythm found in Nature. She currently teaches T'ai Chi and Qigong, with a focus on meditation and spirituality.

She has a BA in European Studies & Languages, and completed an MBS in 1995 in Dublin City University with her thesis exploring Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

She has worked for Irish, German and Australian multinationals writing informational, promotional and spiritual material.

She has travelled extensively, with periods of time living in Germany, France, and more recently, New Zealand and Australia. She wrote a spiritual travel blog throughout that latter time. She now lives in Ireland, her home country. She is a lay Associate of St. Mary's Cistercian Abbey, Glencairn, Ireland.