Contemplation: A Series!

"Yes, dear brothers and sisters, our Christian communities must become genuine 'schools' of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love". Intense prayer, yes, but it does not distract us from our commitment to history: by opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God's plan." - Pope Saint John Paul the Great


It's been three months since the last series, and for that I apologize as the writer of this blog. There have been less and less articles each month, and I hope and pray that will change. In everything, especially with this, God's will be done!

Autumn is here, and with it comes a certain melancholia that begins to pervade everyday life, a tiredness that enters our hearts and brings a soft silence. In  this world of constant actions and words, with movies, music, Facebook and other apps, texts, and so on, a lot of the time it feels like we never have time for silence, or, even worse, that silence is somehow a bad thing. We want so often to be doing SOMETHING, and so often this detains us from the importance of silence, of contemplation.

When most people think of contemplation, they think it's a sort of simple introspection, a looking at one's inner thoughts and trying to understand their meaning. However, we, as Christians, are not called to focus on our own thought, but instead on the thoughts of our Lord: "How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them!" (Psalm 139:17) We are called to speak with our Lord whenever we can, especially in the silence of our hearts, in what Saint John of the Cross calls "the hidden place". That place is where we should go to in prayer, where we may talk with God freely and lovingly.

This series will focus on going to that place, living in contemplation even in everyday life, finding our way especially in the silence and darkness, and, through all of that, loving, giving ourselves, to our Lord Jesus Christ, to have Him, as a great friend of mine once said, as the love of our life.