Come to the quiet.

We find ourselves being pulled in so many directions because of our life's circumstances. We wish that there was a better way to ride through the storms of our daily responsibilities rather than be crushed by them.  So we spend most of our days not fully present in any of our activities, as if something were missing.  The lack of hoped-for vitality seems to be normal; we can't even imagine what life would feel like if we were fully alive. 

We attempt to slake our languishing thirst with so many things:  the mirage of financial security, the complacency following a veritable achievement, the power of a top-level position, the seduction of relationships, the merriment of friends, the allure of current fashion trends and techy-devices, or even secret addictive behaviors that tear us apart inside. 

Yet something deep within us asks this question: Is this as good as life is going to get?  Isn't there something more? Could I have been made for something greater?

 “St. Paul explains that Christ, like Wisdom, can be rejected above all by the rulers of this world (cf. 1 Cor 2:6-9), so that within God's plan, a paradoxical situation is created, the Cross, which was to transform itself into the means of salvation for the whole human race.”

- Pope Benedict XVI, from a Wednesday audience October 22, 2008

“Paradoxes are mysteries and cannot be comprehended by natural reason alone. To seek to understand them implies that one is opening up to the mystical life, that which cannot be understood by logic alone.”

- John Michael Talbot in Lessons from a Troubadour

G.K. Chesterton

“All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.”

Blessed Columba Marmion, OSB

"How will God make us have ineffable 'fellowship with' His Divine life so as to make sharers of the eternal beatitude?  By adopting up as His children ... the admission of a stranger into a family, as a member, taking its name, receiving a title, and the right of inheritance of possessions.  For us, then, participation in this Divine life is effected through grace -- an interior quality produced in us by God, inhering the soul, adorning it and making it pleasing to God -- in virtue of which our soul becomes capable of knowing God as God knows himself; of loving God as God loves himself; of joying in God as God is filled with His own beatitude, and thus living the life of God Himself. "

Gordon Dalbey

"The Father wants us to receive His blessings, because if we refuse Him, we remain in the fantasy of our own principled self-sufficiency.  Only when we humbly confess and receive His amazing generosity are we freed from our selfishness to give graciously and generously to others.  This relationship with the Father requires not only knowing his Law, but knowing His Character as well. In particular, to move beyond Law to spirit, from slave to son, a man must know the Father's Mercy -- that is, that relationship with the Father/Lawmaker is sustained even when we, in our human weakness, inevitably break the Law."

Dr. Henry Cloud

 "These aspects of the "likeness of God" -- our personalities --  are still there in their pristine form if, because of injury, they have been separated from time.  Through bringing [these situations] into the light of experience in grace-giving relationships with our true selves, they can be matured and redeemed in God's masterful process."