Opening Our Mind

Giving frees us from
the familiar territory of our own needs
by opening our mind to the unexplained
worlds occupied by the needs of others.
Barbara Bush

www.gratefulness.org

Seeking God

We must in all things seek God.
But we do not seek Him the way we seek a lost object, a "thing."
He is present to us in our heart, in our personal subjectivity, and to seek Him is to recognize this fact.
Yet we cannot be aware of it as a reality unless He reveals His presence to us. He does not reveal Himself simply in our own heart.
He reveals Himself to us in the Church, in the community of believers, in the koinonia of those who trust Him and love Him.
Seeking God is not just an operation of the intellect, or even a contemplative illumination of the mind.
We seek God by striving to surrender ourselves to Him whom we do not see, but Who is in all things and through all things and above all things.

Thomas Merton.

Seasons of Celebration: 223-224.

We grow and flourish in our own lives in so far as we live for others and through others.
What we ourselves lack, God has given them.
They must complete us where we are deficient.
Hence we must always remain open to one another so that we can always share with each other.

Thomas Merton

Seasons of Celebration: 229

The Merton Institute For Comtemplative Living

Secrets

Secrets keep me sick.

I will listen and share and be well.

A Part Of Life

Trouble is a part of life,
and if you don't share it,
you don't give the person
who loves you a chance
to love you enough.
--Dinah Shore

My fellowship is there, a warm, friendly, and accepting family. My Higher Power loves me. I am not alone, no matter where I travel, no matter how large my problems seem at the moment. My joy is doubled and my sadness diminished through the sharing of my hearts.

An Inner Choice -- Peace

Often we look at the outside world and find it in a state of seeming chaos or disorder.
We feel compelled to transform the situation from one of turmoil into one of peace, yet we are often disappointed in our best attempts to do so.
One reason for this is that we cannot bring to the world what we do not have to offer.
Peace starts in our own minds and hearts, not outside of ourselves, and until its roots are firmly entrenched in our own selves, we cannot manifest it externally.
Once we have found it within, we can share it with our family, our community, and the whole wide world.
Some of us may already be doing just that, but for most of us, the first step is looking within and honestly evaluating the state of our own relationship to peacefulness.
Interestingly, people who manifest peace internally are not different from us; they have chattering thoughts and troubled emotions like we all do.
The difference is that they do not lend their energy to them, so those thoughts and feelings can simply rise and fall like the waves of the ocean without disturbing the deeper waters of peacefulness within.
We all have this ability to choose how we distribute our energy, and practice enables us to grow increasingly more serene as we choose the vibration of peace over the vibration of conflict.
We begin to see our thoughts and feelings as tiny objects on the surface of our being that pose no threat to the deep interior stillness that is the source of peacefulness.
When we find that we are able to locate ourselves more and more in the deeper waters and less on the tumultuous surface of our being, we have discovered a lasting relationship with peace that will enable us to inspire peace beyond ourselves.
Until then, we help the world most by practicing the art of choosing peace within.

-- DailyOM

Discovery Of Truth

A deep and genuine concern for other people will remind us that the discovery of truth is not to be a victory for some and a defeat for others.
Unless all can claim a share in that victory, truth itself will continue to be rejected by the losers, because it will be regarded as inseparable from the yoke of defeat.
And so, confrontation, controversy and the like might yield to a genuine united search for God's truth and how it can best be served.

-- From Saint of The Day