I wake up several times during the night, a consequence of Night Shifts. Medidation subjects keep me thinking. Mostly I love the Passion, several saints, particularly St Paul of the Cross recommend this as the Premier subject of Meditation. It is said of Our Lady that thoughts of the Passion were never thought out of her thoughts and heart and no doubt this is true. So I am such a fan ,were she goes I go too. Of all the Passion I love the Garden of Olives the most. I have often thought that the entrance into suffering is actually worse than the suffering itself. Another great favorite of mine is to sit behind Padre Pio in the choir of the little old Church of Our Lady of Grace as he says the rosary. Just to sit behind him watching him say the rosary. It delights me. But the other night I was restless and a sudden thought came to me out of the blue to start and ask God questions and see if He would talk to me face to face, the way humans do. A question and answer session. I have never done this before and the idea delighted me. So I started. I find myself in a cave of light. I asked , 'Lord are you there?' Total, total silence. I asked a few times more still total silence. Then a voice came to me. 'You know that is not the way I speak to you. I speak to you as a couple speaks who hold each others hands. I speak to you as the waves hit the beach. An Eternal sea of love hitting the beach of that which is mortal. Two hearts beating as one. The voice of love. The action of the Holy Spirit. More sure and certain than human words. Deeper by far.' The voice of God inside is the sound of my own heart beating, in time with His. The love waves of Eternity.
This is a profound insight from God. I am a little breathless. What a grace and a gift He shared with you.
Wow Padraig I can most certainly confirm your thoughts for you.. A good friend of mine a very Holy priest called with me on Friday night and stayed and had dinner with me.. One subject that we discussed was how God listens and speaks with us ? He only has time for whats in our heart and soul its where we communicate together
I came across a couple of quotes by accident form Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta during the week. She talks about the huge need to spend time listening to God. She led a very,very,very busy life indeed. But nevertheless she seems to have spent a huge amount of time in front of the Blessed Sacrament in prayer. The only way she could have done this I think was by often simply not sleeping at night and praying. How she managed I can't imagine. “Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.” 'God speaks in the silence of the Heart' Padre Pio was asked one time about his life and he replied, 'I was only a humble Friar who prayed' It is evident then that the saints found their source , the strength for all they did in prayer. As Mother Teresa famously said one time. 'I am not a Social Worker. All that I do, I do out of love'.
I also spend a lot of time in prayer. I go to bed and can feel Him calling me to visit with Him and I too spend time awake at night in prayer. Most of the time just silent being with Him, or me doing all the talking. Sometimes though I ask Him questions and get a response. Usually if I ask Him to tell me story about His creation, He will answer and I feel like a child with the best bed time story ever! He always has a lesson for me in it too. One example was when He explained the creation of light (any light even just lighting a candle) and related how light once created never dies, just travels through space forever. The same with a human soul never dying but living forever. I've never been a scholarly person so perhaps everyone already knows this but I didn't until then. He also taught me about fire and we discussed whether it was alive or not, and what constitutes life according to man and then compared what life is according to God. Once being afraid I was offending Him I asked Him if I was just talking to myself? and if so give me a sign and make me stop it. His response was "Are you that intelligent?" Just always remember that Demons are very intelligent and will try to lead you "gently" from the Catholic Church and the Sacraments. Always humbly check everything you hear against the Catechism, keep in a state of Grace and go to Confession and receive the Eucharist often to stay safe... As Padraig was told, the normal prayer communication is through the heart in silence, but almost everyone I know has, at one point or another had some answer with a voice they thought was from God.
Wow! The Bridegroom and the Bride. Wonderful testimony. It reminds me a little bit of 1 Kings 19:12: The LORD Speaks to Elijah at Horeb …11Then the LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD. Behold, the LORD is about to pass by.” And a great and mighty wind tore into the mountains and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. 12After the earthquake there was a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still, small voice. 13When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. I do wish I could here the Lord talking to me. I told a priest that once and he said, "be careful what you ask for!" Just today I said to the Lord, "here I am Lord, I come to do your will .... ". Silence.
I agree HH. I have only once ‘heard’ in my heart what I am absolutely certain was Jesus responding to my question. It was a simple 3 words, but to-the-point, response.
Thanks HeavenlyHosts. Yes I do feel the Lord "speaks" to me in the way that He puts feelings on my heart. Sometimes also I feel like I am given to know certain things without really having put in the groundwork to certifiably know such things. These are the 2 ways that God seems to speak to me. I do know all about such groundwork after many years of study in the sciences. But the things of the spiritual world are very different I suppose. Sometimes I think it is like a dream world, until I am yanked into incarnational reality of the deaths of the Martyrs, the passion and death of Jesus on the Cross. I wonder has anyone come across Sam Shamoun? He has a great gift for knowledge of Scripture which amazes me. A kind of Savant who knows chapter and verse every line of Scripture with many different Bible translations. And he interprets Scripture well. He is of the Assyrian Church. I do love the way he prays but sometimes I am shocked at how blunt he can be, especially when it comes to those who attack Christianity and the Most Blessed Trinity. He speaks Arabic and knows Hebrew too and knows the Quaran as well. Anyway, I am straying off again ... Yes, I was going to say that the Lord puts feelings on my heart. Feelings which have not been elaborated or articulated - they feel like a tug on my conscience. Now, with my technologically corrupted view of things, I will say something about the next steps. (Maybe Quis ut Deus could relate to this mechanistic view.) Then, either my heart pushes these "things" or "feelings" into my mind, or my mind pulls them from my heart - possibly the action of the Holy Spirit. There may be some loss of the content here. Finally, my mind with its intellect compromised to varying degrees by the weight of sin or concupisence, writes the message into the logs of my material, physical brain, which again is compromised to some extent by the vissicitudes it has experienced in life. Somewhere in here, there is Supernatutal Grace working too I hope. But that is not a very adept way of saying these things. (Perhaps it smacks of modernism) The language of poetry, of the heart, of Scripture is much nicer.
I am sorry I have not been keeping up with this thread. Some very interesting comments. I have been very busy in the hospital, but I will be back at it next week when I retire on the 31st. It is a bit like waiting for a million Christmas's rolled into one. So very happy...but till then, slogging away.
I think , if you live beside the seaside you might no longer hear the sounds of the waves because they are so constant. You take them for granted and forget about them. But the fact you don't hear the waves washing up on the shore doesn't mean they have stopped doing so. It is like that with God and our hearts. The waves that are washing up on the beach of our hearts is God saying, 'I love you, I love, I love you.' Over and over again for all Eternity. The fact that we do not hear this does not mean that God has stopped saying it. We have to take the time out and go down into the beach of of hearts and take time out to hear the waves of love washing in from heaven. We have to pray , which is another way of saying we have to listen. The Sea The sea, We see dancing along the shores of clear bays, Shimmers with silver The sea Changing shimmers Under the rain The sea With the summer sky Mix up her white horses With the angels so pure The infinite azure shepherdess Sea Sea By the ponds Those big wet reeds See Those white birds And those rusty houses The sea Has cradled them Along the shores of clear bays And with a love song The sea Has rocked my heart for life
I came across the most wonderful, wonderful true story of an authentic mystic who talked very directly to God and who was in constant contact with the Vatican and several Popes about this yesterday. Totally, totally amazing! Maria Teresa Carloni! Exodus 20:19 ....and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”
I think it was the German Mystical writer, Meister Ekardt who compared the soul as a piece of iron dropped into the furnace of God's Love, being melted and becoming one with the fire of love it drops into. Yet the paradox id that the soul does not become annihilated or destroyed by being consumed by love; in fact it becomes what it was always meant to be; it becomes totally a child of God. St Paul says this so well, 'I live not I , Christ lives in me'. I think this is the mark of the greatest spiritual writing, that it reduces itself to huge simplicity. Often poetry.
I think one of the most beautiful ways of hearing the voice of God is in music. St Hildgard of Bingen went to heaven in prayer and heard the angels singing. I believe she actually did so . ...and brought back the music for us all to hear. Her music has become wildly popular in modern times.
The, 'Jesus Prayer', in Eastern Christianity is wonderful . The two books that taught me about this prayer were, 'The Way of the Pilgrim'. and the follow up , 'The Pilgrim continues on his way'.
At the start of the book the Pilgrim is taught by a Holy Monk in Russia to pray the Jesus prayer which is very simple: 'Lord Jesus Christ Son of God , have mercy on me a sinner'. The pilgrim then has to keep on saying the prayer until it becomes self starting. In other words the prayer becomes as much a part of us as our life as heart beats or breathing. This is not to be forced but gradually to grow. The prayer grows inside us to such an extent that we become the prayer. I believe , as far as I remember tha tthis form of spirituality is called, 'Heychasm.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm Hesychasm Hesychasm (/ˈhɛsɪkæzəm, ˈhɛzɪ-/;[1] Greek: Ησυχασμός) is a contemplative monastic tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church in which stillness (hēsychia) is sought through uninterrupted Jesus prayer.[web 1] While rooted in early Christian monasticism, it took its definitive form in the 14th century at Mount Athos. Etymology Hesychasm (Greek: ἡσυχασμός, Modern Greek pronunciation: [isixaˈzmos]) derives from the word hesychia (ἡσυχία, Greek pronunciation: [isiˈçia]), meaning "stillness, rest, quiet, silence"[2] and hesychazo (ἡσυχάζω Greek pronunciation: [isiˈxazo]) "to keep stillness". Origins and development Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a scholar of Eastern Orthodox theology, distinguishes five distinct usages of the term "hesychasm":[3][4] "solitary life", a sense, equivalent to "eremitical life", in which the term is used since the 4th century; "the practice of inner prayer, aiming at union with God on a level beyond images, concepts and language"; "the quest for such union through the Jesus Prayer"; "a particular psychosomatic technique in combination with the Jesus Prayer", use of which technique can be traced back at least to the 13th century; "the theology of St. Gregory Palamas", on which see Palamism.
There was a modern Russian Aristocrat lady whose Cause is up for Canonisation called Catherine De Hueck Dohertry who died a few years back. She fled Russia and eventually wound up living in Canada and wrote widely and wonderfully on this kind of Sprituality is you are interested.
The reason why I mention this kind of prayer is that I think it is very,very similiar to the Holy Rosary, if you think about it. We say the same prayers over and over again . Our Journey with the Rosary is that at first, at the start we say the Rosary, but at the end of our journey we are meant to become the Rosary. We are meant to turn into a shining little golden pair of Rosary Beads that never stop praying ; as St Paul asked us in Scripture, to, 'Pray without ceasing'. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circum- stances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:15-18).
