Contemplation

I’m at the point in
Light Shining Through A Veil,
On Saint Clare’s Letters to Saint Agnes of Prague,
by Edith A Van den Goorbergh, O.S.C., and Theodore H. Zweerman
where St. Clare unveils her own experience of contemplation
for St. Agnes.

I got a taste of it!

Wow.

Contemplation is a different plane,
a different dimension.
It’s not so much a part of life as a quality of life.

It pervades.

It’s nourished in silence and solitude
and the intentional turning to God in prayer,
but it’s by no means limited to that.

It’s a state of soul, a way of being,
broken open to the vulnerability
of eternal Realities.

Wide-open wonder!

It is SO desirable!

Fragile.

Tender.

Pulsing with life.

Like an exposed heart on an operating table,
a newly-hatched birdling in a nest,
an open wound.

God is tenderly protective of it
(which is why His contemplatives are enclosed!).

This is how the Blessed Virgin lived.
Jesus too.

This is the life of the Church,
the oyster in which irritating grains of sand
are turned into lustrous pearls of great price (see Matthew 13:45-46)–
where sins are redeemed,
heresies turned into illuminating doctrines.

We enter through those pearls,
those gates
(see Revelation 21:21)
for life!