An excerpt from Fr John Main, “Two Words from the Past,” in THE HEART OF CREATION (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 43-44.
A young man recently came to see me and asked, “How can you bear to look out of your window and see the same thing every day? Doesn’t it drive you mad?” Perhaps the real question should be, “How is it we can always see so much, looking out of the same window everyday?” The early fathers knew that boredom comes from desire, the desire for fulfillment or fame, for something new, for a change of environment or activity, for different relationships, for certainty.
Pure prayer shrinks desire. In the stillness of prayer, increasingly still as we approach the Source of all that is, of all that can be, we are so filled with wonder that there is no place for desire. It is not so much that we transcend desire but rather that there is simply no place in us any longer for such desire. All our space is being filled with the wonder of God. The attention that is scattered in desiring is recalled and absorbed in God. [. . . .]
Meditating, we let go of the desire to control, to possess, to dominate. We seek instead only to be who we are and being the person we are, we are open to the God who is.
After meditation: “In January, One Morning” by Margaret Gibson in EARTH ELEGY: New and Selected Poems (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997), p. 200.
In January, One Morning
the change in light alerts you—you want
a simple belief.
Blowing long steady breaths for fire in the kindling
you follow the ricochet of light moving in winged
shadows, as over water, continually beyond itself—
you realize the shape of light is its own
radiance.
Walking out past winter sumac in quiet fields
you find wind spread wide
and light—
last evening only a seam you split in wood—
spills from hollow pods, from each crack
and rent of this credible world, so clean
it suffices.
