The Quiet

   It's funny. The Quiet is so strong, so compelling. I want to write about it but when I try, there is nothing to say, no words. Only the Quiet...
   The Quiet is like a person who visits without phoning, not a friend so much as a teacher, but not a teacher so much as a Watcher and a Guide. When the Quiet arrives I look for my shoes and coat. It is time to go somewhere. The Quiet is hard to describe.
  There is another, like the Quiet, but even harder to talk about. The Awareness is a moment when everything pauses and nothing seems like itself. The sky, the land, the buildings are all painted pictures on scrim. The whole world is a theater set, an illusion behind which something greater moves. I step out of the moment to stand in the company of the Awareness, to stare at reality waiting for the curtain to go up. Waiting for something even greater than the Quiet to begin. I live surrounded by angels and guides. When they come near, life must pause, for they have the presence of the One I seek within themselves. That is what I am feeling. That is why all the world bows in recognition...
   These feelings are brief, and when they leave I feel my real poverty... but I also feel my real wealth. For how can I cry out against the one Who comes when he chooses to withdraw? I am never abandoned, only poor, and my poverty is his poverty. He knows how it feels.

   I love the world which is Heaven and its people. I feel like the luckiest wanderer who, coming over a mountain sees the Kingdom at last, spreading out before me. But the Franciscans teach that the Kingdom is also here and now, in and among the people and times of the world. This World is God's self-revelation. We see him everywhere, and He is love. I think of the story of Francis preaching to birds and it doesn't seem so unusual. It says somewhere that we are to proclaim the Gospel to all creatures. I walk out to the garden in the company of the Quiet and my dogs are like bouncing balls, rattling and banging around the yard. Hmm, I think, perhaps a little preaching might be in order here... But I don't know what to say to them, only through my hands, my eyes, a moment of mutual wrestling. God loves us. God loves us, I say. He is here. Do you feel him? Perhaps they don't, but they calm down and move away, giving me some space, giving the Quiet some space to surround me--until the Awareness hits like a wall falling down and I am left gasping with desire. All I can say is "Yes, yes, yes!" That's how it is.


   So I have given you a secret from my heart, something I have never told anyone before. The world we see around us, beautiful as it is and filled with love, is not the whole of it. There is more, and we are meant to find it, to hold it in our hearts and our hands. We are meant to "lay hands on it and eat, that we might live". This mystery is the spirit within Eucharist, the ongoing, all-encompassing sacrament of God's presence. "This is the bread that comes down from Heaven, that all people might take hold of it and eat, and live." It is a moment, it is a person, it is a way. It is Christ. He wants us to put our hands on him and know he is with us.  That is why we feel the Quiet, his emmisary, who comes to tell us he is coming. The Awareness... well, that, I suppose, is the King himself, coming through the door. I throw myself down, heart and soul, in his presence, hoping he will lift me up. His hands, his arms, his eyes... everything!