Thursday, April 17, 2008

love, openness, and meditation

From Wayne Burns this morning:

"Many of the obstacles to the life of thought and love which is meditation come from the fact that people insist on walling themselves up inside themselves in order to cherish their own thoughts and their on experiences as a kind of private treasure. They interpret the gospel parable of the talents, and as a result they bury their talent in a napkin instead of putting it to work and increasing it. Even when we come to live a contemplative life, the love of other and openness to others remain, as in the active life, the conditions for a living and fruitful inner life of thought and love. The love of others is a stimulus to interior life, not a danger to it, as some mistakenly believe."


(CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER, page 39-40)

2 comments:

  1. "The love of others is a stimulus to the interior life not a danger to it."
    It is good to be reminded of these words. In these times of for me, mental turmoil, my love for my students and others is all I have left of prayer.

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  2. That sounds like quite enough to me, Barbara. In fact, it sounds like probably the only real prayer that there is.

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