God: Quotes from Lebh Shomea

From The Inner Loneliness by Sebastian Moore:

"God, then, is beyond knowing and loving. But it would be better to say that God is behind knowing and loving, or that God is the origin of knowing and loving." (110)

"God is all in all, infinite, self-sufficient. God, then, does not look to knowing and love to connect him with the real. He is the real, he is reality." (111)

From Jesus the Liberator of Desire by Sebastian Moore:

"Real desire, what I really want and have always wanted, is to be more and more myself in the mystery in which I am. It is the relatedness that I am to everything and everyone in the mystery trying to realize itself. Desire is love trying to happen. It is the love that permeates all the universe, trying to happen in me." (93)

Who is Sebastian Moore? I am not sure if he still alive but he was/is a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk who wrote many books. There is an interview with him in 2011 about Eckhart Tolle here. He was 94 years old at that time.

Anthony Bloom on Prayer

Looking through those composition books I wrote in for years at Lebh Shomea, I see quotes from various books by the same author. I recall that I would go on a pursuit of more books when I liked what a certain author was saying. That was the blessing for me that Lebh Shomea had (and has) such an extensive library. I remember reading books by Anthony Bloom when our oldest son was in his first years at Texas A & M around 1997.

Anthony Bloom or Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (1914-2003)  was a monk and Metropolitan bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was founder and for many years bishop - then archbishop, then metropolitan - of the Diocese of Sourozh, the Patriarchate of Moscow's diocese for Great Britain and Ireland (the name 'Sourozh' is that of the historical episcopal see in Sudak in the Crimea). As a bishop he became well known as a pastor, preacher, spiritual director and writer on prayer and the Christian life. (from Wikipedia)

Today I will copy a few of the quotes I kept from that long-ago reading of Living Prayer by Anthony Bloom:

"We should never try to squeeze out of the heart any sort of feeling when we come to God; a prayer is a statement, the rest depends on God." (60)

quoting Theophane the Recluse:

". . . ask yourself: 'Am I doing God's will better than I did before?' If you are, prayer has brought its fruits; if you are not, it has not, whatever amount of understanding or feeling you may have derived from the time spent in the presence of God." (62, 63)

"Whatever we have felt belongs to the past and is linked with what we were yesterday, not what we are today. We do not pray in order to provoke any particular experience in which we may delight, but in order to meet God with whatever may happen as a consequence, or to bring him what we have to bring and leave it to him to use it the way he chooses." (104)

"Our prayer always reaches God but it is not always answered by a sense of joy or peace." (108)

". . . .a silence in which, as Julian of Norwich puts it, 'Prayer oneth the soul to God.'" (111)

Prayer: Years of Quotes from Lebh Shomea

Through the past 18 years of going to Lebh Shomea, I collected 13 composition books full of quotes from various books I read there--plus, a few books from other places. Until my last visit to Lebh Shomea, there had never been a copy machine and so I printed quotes I liked from many different books from their extensive library.

I have been re-reading these books as research and for my personal enrichment in the past few weeks. I copied many down on my computer, which seem more readily accessible than these handwritten compendiums.

Much of my emphasis over the years was on prayer, and so I will copy some of those quotes below. I plan to pre-post various quotes (there are so many!) while we go to visit our granddaughters in Austin.

From Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom:

"The day when God is absent, when He is silent--that is the beginning of prayer. Not when we have a lot to say, but when we say to God 'I can't live without You, why are You so cruel, so silent?' This knowledge that we must find or die--that makes us break through to the place where we are in the Presence." (17)

"The moment you try to focus on an imaginary god, or a god you can imagine, you are in great danger of placing an idol between yourself and the real God." (45)

From Catherine de Hueck Doherty in Traits of Healthy Spirituality by Melannie Svoboda:

"Prayer is love. It is love expressed in speech, and love expressed in silence. To put it another way, prayer is the meeting of two loves: the love of God and our love." (88)

"By inviting God to speak to us, we risk being changed; that is, we risk having our attitudes altered, our perspectives broadened, our plans modified." (89)

From Man's Quest for God by Abraham Joshua Heschel:

"Of all the sacred acts, first comes prayer. Religion is not 'what man does with his solitariness.' Religion is what man does with the presence of God. And the spirit of God is present whenever we are willing to accept it. True, God is hiding His face in our time, but He is hiding because we are evading Him." (xiv)

"Prayer is an emanation of what is most precious in us toward Him, the outpouring of the heart before Him." (10)

"God loves what is left over at the bottom of the heart and cannot be expressed in words." (40)