Quotes from Cynthia Bourgeault

Judaism says that you are to partner with God in the work of tikkun, repairing the world with justice, kindness, and humility.

To walk the way of Wisdom is to become transparent to the Light that is your very being.

No one, of course, had foreseen that the first annual Eagle Island Wisdom School would follow so closely on the heels of the events of September 11, but in its shadow our time together was imbued with a newfound sense of purpose that what we were doing was no longer merely a spiritual luxury but a prophetic first step toward the recovery of a vision of human purpose badly eclipsed-and desperately needed-in the Western world.

Wisdom is passionate and heartfelt, giving rise to compassion and love.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.

Where there's surrender, synchronicity tends to follow, which is one of the most delightful side effects of a surrender practice.

Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller "I" with its

Find the place where your feet know how to walk / And follow your own trail home." The way to your heart begins with your feet on the ground, quietly but intensely present.

And so meditation rests on the wager that if you can simply break the tyranny of your ordinary awareness, the rest will begin to unfold itself. At first when you begin a practice of meditation, it feels like a place you go to. You may think of it as "my inner sanctuary" or "my place apart with God." But as the practice becomes more and more established in you so that this inner sanctuary begins to flow out into your life, it becomes more and more a place you come from.

Letting go is not in order to get something better (the point Paul misses in the second half of his Philippians hymn); in and of itself it is the something better. For it immediately restores the broken link with the dynamic ground of reality, which by its very nature flows forth from a fullness beyond imagining.

You are the breath of God. You are the way God is aware of God in the immediacy of your life. You are the way God feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, frees the wrongly imprisoned. You are the way God brings justice, mercy, and humility to life. But because you want to be more, you end up being less: the way God brings horror, hate, and holocaust to every corner of the globe.

This is crucial: The reward for following Wisdom is immediate. The Way to is the Way of.

In a cosmos whose innermost nature has been revealed as Mercy, we need merely rest in the goodness of that embrace and trust

As the poet Rumi says, "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere; they're in each other all along.

The other reason why the mind has been regarded with a certain amount

The other reason why the mind has been regarded with a certain amount of suspicion is its tendency to pull us into a smaller, mentally constructed sense of ourselves: to confuse being with thinking.

what remains with me vividly to this day is my recollection of a circle of light that shone out from Rafe and enfolded us both, and the deep sense of comfort and familiarity between us, as if we had somehow always known each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gone on from eternity.

The gospels record a comical but poignant trail of miscomprehensions and botched efforts to follow the master's lead, culminating in his near-total abandonment during the crucifixion.

the apt conclusion may be not that the universe is meaningless but that we have identified meaning with rational explanation. "Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense?" he asks-and then answers himself with a remarkable observation: "This does not mean that the universe is absurd or meaningless. Only that an understanding of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational human thought"5

Centering Prayer is aimed at healing the violence in ourselves and purifying the unconscious of its hidden and flawed motivation that reduces and can even cancel out the effectiveness of the external works of mercy, justice, and peace.

is to break through the bonds that attach the individual to the world of his senses and separate him from his eternal nature.

Jesus here places his entire bet on the process of interabiding: I in you, you in me, all in God, God in all. It is not a ladder but a circle that brings us to God: the continuously renewed giving and receiving which in its totality is where God dwells.

In prayer we acknowledge God as the suprenie source from which flows all strength, all goodness, all existence, acknowledging that we have our being, lift, itself from this supreme Power. One can then communicate with this Source, worship it, and ultirmatelil place one"s eery center in it.

Nada te turbe, nada te'espante; Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Nada te turbe, nada te'espante, Solo Dios basta.