Quotes About Contemplation

Fully human and fully divine" is, to use a loaded word, a mystery. Something not to be solved, but to be pondered.

So if anyone asks you to define Ignatian spirituality in a few words, you could say that it is: Finding God in all things Becoming a contemplative in action Looking at the world in an incarnational way Seeking freedom and detachment

Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

The Seven Storey Mountain,

GOD COMMUNICATES WITH US in many ways. But prayer is a special time when God's voice is often heard most clearly because we are giving God our undivided attention. Whether in Ignatian contemplation, lectio divina, the colloquy, the examen, or any other practice, the "still small" voice can be heard with a clarity that can delight, astonish, and surprise you. So when you pray, however you pray, and feel that God is speaking to you—pay attention.

Maybe one reason that the work seems dull is because you're not bringing it up before God in prayer,

Finally, in the last step of the examen you ask for the grace of God's help during the next day, and you can close with any prayer you like. Ignatius suggests the Our Father.

Then, when you sit in the chair, you're reminded, often in a surprising way, that God is gazing upon you and is with you in your prayer.

God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him. "Thus," Father Kolvenbach wrote, "looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God." The examen helps you see God in retrospect.

If asked to define Ignatian spirituality, the first thing out of their mouths would most likely be finding God in all things.

After "finding God in all things," the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a contemplative in action.

Finally, Ignatian spirituality is about freedom and detachment

specifically The Seven Storey Mountain and No Man Is An Island that led me to where I am today and helped me become the person I was meant to be.

Aristotle, who believed that we become like the object of our contemplation.

We are gradually losing the art of silence. Of walking down the street lost in our own thoughts. Of closing the door to our rooms and being quiet. Of sitting on a park bench and just thinking. We may fear silence because we fear what we might hear from the deepest parts of ourselves. We may be afraid to hear that "still small" voice. What might it say? Might it ask us to change?

watching the sky, contemplating the restorative power of unexpected kindness.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.

She ruminated, wondering in terms of ration, quotient, multiplicand, root, power, infinity, surd.

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

In creating a "hold upon nearness" the poetic word creates a place where we can stand for a while, allowing us to bear witness to our own being.

No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars. —IPHIGENIA, A TRAGEDY BY QUINTUS ENNIUS (239–169 B.C.)

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.