“Now, at the start of a new year, the True Love gives as the first in a sequence of gifts a partridge in a pear tree. It is a pretty picture, even though it is so quaint. It belongs to another age; an age when there was more time, more opportunity, to escape into aloneness, to survey, to ponder.”
“It’s probably less important that Christ was born, but more important that Christ is born in us. And that can happen at any time. It’s not limited to any time of the year.”
“An angel tells the young Mary that God has elected her to be the means whereby divine love will be enfleshed in the human world. As a parabolic character, Mary represents us. She is a normal human being, which means that she is, by nature as it were, self-centered, self-enclosed. So she asks, in effect: ‘How can that happen? I’m alone; it’s just me.’ The angel replies, ‘The Holy Spirit will overtake you, and the power of God will overshadow you…'”
“‘Hospitality’ as a word today is more often associated with ‘industry’ than with personal or community behaviour… Advertising tries to teach us to link ‘rest’ with a holiday somewhere hot, a luxury purchase, an indulgence, me-time (and perhaps we need some of that sometimes). However, we also need to be careful to avoid having a too commercialised or individualised understanding of what rest is. There are many kinds of rest (physical, mental, emotional) but to truly experience most of these does require the creation of a social space that allows it.”
“Leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen… Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence that is the pre-requisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent, do not hear. Silence as it is used in this context, does not mean ‘dumbness’ or ‘noiselessness’: it means more nearly that the soul’s power to ‘answer’ to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”
“The great spiritual traditions suggest that the relationship with God is cultivated like other relationships: as we turn our attention toward God we open the possibility of a fuller relationship. Entering into this relationship does not so much require a change in our behavior as a shift of attention.”
“All the nobler instincts of our race are born in solitude and suckled by silence. This solitude need be no far away wilderness in Nature; this silence need be no Himalayan peak. You stop for a second as you cross your city square and glance at the belt of Orion.”
I am aware, / As I go commonly sweeping the stair, / Doing my part of the every-day care / Human and simple my lot and my share / I am aware of a marvelous thing: / Voices that murmur and ethers that ring / In the far stellar spaces where cherubim sing.
“Simple manual tasks, the kind we often seek to obliterate by playing the radio while we work, are actually precious opportunities to strengthen our capacity for inner silence. For with the radio off we can use the activity to practice resting our awareness on the working surface – the place where the newspaper touches the window we are washing, or where the broom’s bristles sweep the floor. If our attention strays we can simply and gently notice that it has, and return it to the working surface.”
“The worst disservice we could do would be to commit the heresy of identifying the act of contemplation with a block of empty time or with the provision of an empty space, or to limit it to a certain peculiarly endowed class of persons, or in Greek fashion, to a social class that was drenched with leisure. Contemplation is, as we have insisted, standard equipment, and can never be completely identified with vacant spaces in life or with freedom from responsibility.”
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