Ancient spiritual wisdom to heal our troubled modern souls
On Solitude
“Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter…the place of our salvation”
On Silence
“First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak.”
On Prayer
“The prayer of the heart opens the eyes of our soul to the truth of ourselves as well as the truth of God. The prayer of the heart challenges us to hide absolutely nothing.”
Solitude. Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit where he undertook one of the most severe tests on his life. I suppose Satan sought to nip his ministry in the bud, so to speak. But it is promising that God did not abandon Jesus, ever. While he was in the wilderness, accosted by Satan, God sent his angels to minister to him. In the solitude of the desert, Jesus found the wonderful presence of his father in the midst of some of his darkest temptations.
Silence. The psalmist says, “Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” (Psalm 46:10) To be still is to wait quietly. According to this verse, two powerful things can happen when we come before God listening and waiting in silence. First, we can be assured that he is God and second, while we are quite before the Lord, listening, he will be exalted among the nations.
Prayer. Nouwen criticizes our tendency to reduce our approach to God to a mere intellectual pursuit, advocating an intentional exercise of the heart in prayer. “When we enter with our mind into our heart and there stand in the presence of God, then all our mental preoccupations become prayer.” (p. 86) Nouwen points the way, through prayer, to a restful heart in a tumultuous world. This makes our prayer life of great value in our daily Christian walk.
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