Quotes about Contemplation

Meditation means to let the word descend from our minds into our hearts and thus to become enfleshed.

Active waiting is essential to the spiritual life.

when we listen to the Spirit, we hear a deeper sound, a different beat. ...Living a spiritually mature life requires listening to God's voice within and among us.

One good way to listen is to listen with a sacred text: a psalm or a prayer, for instance. The Hindu spiritual writer Eknath Easwaran showed me the great value of learning a sacred text by heart and repeating it slowly in the mind, word by word, sentence by sentence. In this way, listening to the voice of love becomes not just a passive waiting, but an active attentiveness to the voice that speaks to us through the words of the Scriptures.

Without reading the word, silence becomes stale, and without silence, the word loses its re-creative power. The word leads to silence and silence to the word. The word is born in silence, and silence is the deepest response to the word.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation.

Whether in solitude or community, whether alone or with others, we are called to live obedient lives, that is, lives of unceasing prayer — "unceasing" not because of the many prayers we say but because of our alertness to the unceasing prayer of God's Spirit within and among us.

Gazing is probably the best word to touch the core of Eastern spirituality. Whereas St. Benedict, who has set the tone for the spirituality of the West, calls us first of all to listen, the Byzantine fathers focus on gazing.

Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.