An excerpt from John Main OSB “Fullness of Being” in The Hunger for Depth and Meaning (Singapore: Medio Media, 2007), p. 28.
(The) truth is not only accessible to us, it is the ground on which all reality stands. To come to this reality, we have to learn to be simple, to be still, to be silent, and to be attentive to what is. . .. So we must learn to stop thinking about ourselves. We must learn to be, to be in the presence of God, in the presence of the One who is, and who is the ground of being. We need to have no fear as we set out, as we leave self behind and set out to meet the other. We need have no fear. The spirit in our heart, the spirit that we open to in meditation, is the spirit of compassion, of gentleness, of forgiveness, of total acceptance, the spirit of love.
After meditation: “Lead” by Mary Oliver in DEVOTIONS: Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin, 2019), Kindle edition.
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
Image by Eukalyptus from Pixabay
