Kelly Flanagan on Unwrapping the Real You

For some time now I am following the personal blog of Kelly Flanagan, a clinical psychologist living in Wheaton, Ill. The text he has just published is, up to this moment, the best I have read this Christmas. Here is just a fragment, the most important one, I think.

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I don’t believe in identity formation anymore.

Because figuring out who we are isn’t about making something new; it’s about seeing something old. There’s no such thing as identity formation; there is only identity recognition. There is only a new awareness of something original in us. In the end, we don’t make something of ourselves; we glimpse something of ourselves.

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Fr. Richard Rohr – Finding God in the Depth of Silence

If you have two hours to spare, it is really worth watching this presentation of Fr. Rohr on the spiritual benefit of silence.

Fr. Richard Rohr, ecumenical teacher, author and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Rohr shares his perspective on Silence as the only thing broad enough and deep enough to hold all of the contradictions and paradoxes of Full Reality and our own reality, too. 99.9% of the known universe is silent, and it is in this space that the force fields of life and compassion dwell and expand. We can live there too!

This recording is from the 2013 May edition of the Festival of Faiths.

 

Christine Valters Paintner – Monk in the World 1/7 – Silence and Solitude

Christine Valters Paintner, from the virtual monastic community called Abbey of the Arts, has kindly give me permission to publish here a few of her meditations is this series.

I do it in the hope that at least a few of my readers will become interested and will subscribe to receive them through email.

So, here is the first one.

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Silence and Solitude“Silence is never merely the cessation of words . . . Rather it is the pause that holds together-indeed, it makes sense of-all the words, both spoken and unspoken. Silence is the glue that connects our attitudes and our actions. Silence is the fullness, not emptiness; it is not absence, but the awareness of a presence.” -John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

Fr. Richard Rohr on Silence

One good thing that silence and waiting has taught me is that our lives are always usable by God. We need not always be effective, but only transparent and vulnerable. Then we are instruments, no matter what we do. Silence is the ability to trust that God is acting, teaching, and using me—even before I perform, or after my seeming failures. Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing.

God takes it from there, and there is not much point in comparing who is better, right, higher or lower, or supposedly saved. We are all partial images slowly coming into focus, as long as we allow and filter the Light and Love of God, which longs to shine through us—as us!

Adapted from Contemplation in Action, p. 134

Prayer: Listen to the stillness, the language of God.