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

A Contemplative Practice

Contemplation is a form of prayer and inner knowing. Thomas Merton calls it the intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. Contemplation isn't something we do, but rather an explanation or description of how we are transformed from within. St. John of the Cross wrote about this inner transformation in The Dark Night of the Soul. We become emptied and purified by life's trials and experiences. It is in the daily, often unsure, living of our lives when we consent to this process of being transformed, that we can ultimately rest back into our true nature. Here, Wisdom grows, and we recognise ourselves. A daily Contemplative practice helps us surrender moment by moment to this process, and brings us back to Resting in God (St. Gregory The Great).

In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

St. John of the Cross.

Here are some contemplative practices which help to stay anchored in the Heart:

1. Exercise every day, even if it is a short 15 minute walk. The body needs it.
2. Get out into nature, or at least let your eyes visit it. Nature knows balance.
3. Have a moment of prolonged silence. Practice meditation or meditative movement. Plan a retreat to immerse deeper into Silence.
4. Develop the ability to hear intuitively. Practice listening and receiving. Surrendering is allowing situations to be as they are. Active times move seamlessly into times of retreat and then forward again into action. Move and respond to this rhythm.
5. Let music feed your Spirit.
6. There is a season for everything. Allow things and people to ebb and flow.
7. Know yourself. Forgive your flaws and habitual reactions - they'll probably always be with you. Contemplation brings them to rest. Allow others to have their flaws.
8. Laugh, a lot.
9. Love. Someone at rest with themselves can love easily.
10. Be willing to grieve how little you know, how little power you have, how misunderstood you can be, how painful your circumstances can become. This is purification - the dark night of the soul. Grief transforms into a deep peace and inner knowing.
11. Know what anchors you and brings you inner Rest. Consent to it.
12. Read sacred enlightened texts daily. Remember and recognise Truth.
13. Consent to Spirit/God/Presence within. This is Contemplative Prayer. You are being prayed into Being.

Start thinking about a practice you can manage. Contemplation invites you to make anchoring your practice, and then do it continually. There is no success, no failure. By allowing the current moment to be as it is, Rest is welcomed. You are home.

A Heart Without Words

I am neither a man of letters nor of science,
but I humbly claim to be a man of prayer.
It is prayer that has saved my life.
Without it I would have lost my reason long ago.
If I did not lose my peace of soul, in the midst of my many trials,
it is because of the peace that comes to me through prayer.

Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi said that prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. "It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

How many times have we found it impossible to put words on what is in our hearts? Words often cannot capture the landscape there, or touch the yearning. We may try to find words to describe it, but they inevitably fall short.

I have always known that the deepest aches of the heart are always heard. They are utterances longing for rest. Sometimes just being heard is enough for them. At others, the allowing of the interior ache to exist brings untold relief. Sometimes, we have to practice patient unknowing until some sense of resolution eventually comes.

We have also known times when the deepest joys have sculpted the interior landscape in ways we find difficult to express. When we tried to share these moments, they paled in significance, and we eventually learned to treasure these places within, no longer holding the necessity to bring others there.

We do not need to speak. We do not need words. The heart speaks volumes. And it is heard. This is Contemplation.

  We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.

Romans 8:26