Had a relaxing stay at the Monastery of the Ascension. Spent time in prayer with the monks, had some great conversations with Fr. Andrew, Fr. Boniface, Br. Maur and Br. Selby. I had a chance to just relax, spend time doing a few things that I’ve been needing/wanting to do but haven’t found the time to do, read and prayed.
Silence is hard. Spent some time with Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude. He wrote much about poverty; much that is worth repeating:
“The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He knows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him. The more we are content with our own poverty, the closer we are to God, for then we accept our poverty in peace, expecting nothing from ourselves and everything from God...And no matter how abandoned we may seem to be, the confident desire to love Him in spite of our abject misery is the sign of His presence and the pledge of our salvation.”
I felt my poverty this weekend – I felt my total and absolute dependence upon someone outside of myself. I’m content with my weakness, my struggles, my failings. I am learning to not expect much from me – but that what happens through me will be because of God and God’s work in my life. I also read some from St. John of Damascus’ treatise On the Divine Images [basically a defense for the use of icons, written to the iconoclasts]. He speaks with authority and passion, as the issue was extremely important to him. In his own words:
“I do not adore the creation rather than the Creator, but I adore the one who became a creature, who was formed as I was, who clothed Himself in creation without weakening or departing from His divinity, that He might raise our nature in glory and make us partakers of His divine nature…..I do not worship matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation!“