Month: October 2020

The material world about is visible to us. What we can see with our own eyes, touch with our own hands, we can verify. But the invisible world, the reality beyond the present reality, which we cannot physically touch or see – how to verify that?  There is no way, scientifically or intellectually, that we can come by such knowledge, for it is knowledge of another order. No one can be argued into a knowledge of God. Truth remains a revelation. No one can be talked into falling in love. Love remains an experience. And in the silence of meditation there will come a knowledge that has nothing to do with questionnaires or encyclopedias, a knowledge that cannot be proved scientifically or even pinned down into words ­– and yet it is a knowledge of unshaken and unshakable surety.

‘Our real journey,’ wrote Thomas Merton, ‘is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening and of an ever-greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action.  I pray that we may all do so.’

So many people today hunger for the things of the spirit which all too often they do not find within our churches or synagogues. And yet the treasure that is beyond all price is waiting there for us, as Teilhard de Chardin discovered:

And so, for the first time in my life perhaps – although I am supposed to meditate every day!- I took the lamp and leaving the zone of every day preoccupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I felt that my power of action emanates… but I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me… And when I had tostop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless pit at my feet, and out of it came – arising I know not where – the current which I dare to call my life.