Postures of the Spirit

Patience, silence in prayer, and listening with the ear of the heart requires me to bend toward God. Inside the still, silent chrysalis the caterpillar’s body breaks down and a new life is forming. “Making a cocoon and the transformation that goes on inside it involves weaving an environment of prayer, but not the sort of prayer we usually think of. No, this is something mysteriously different. This prayer isn’t about talking and doing and thinking. It’s about postures. Postures of the Spirit. It’s turning oneself upside down so that everything is emptied out and God can flow in.” ~Sue Monk Kidd

In all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance… ~Teilhard de Chardin

I try to take time to let go, to listen, in much the same way that I listen when I am writing. This is praying time, and the act of listening in prayer is the same act as listening in writing…And then there is time in which to be, simply to be, that time in which God quietly tells us who we are and who he wants us to be. It is then that God can take our emptiness and fill it up with what he wants, and drain away the business with which we inevitably get involved in the daily-ness of human living. ~Madeleine L’Engle

The fruit of silence is prayer. The fruit of prayer is faith. The fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service. The fruit of service is peace. ~Mother Teresa

We hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. -Romans 8:25