Friends of Silence Monthly Letter for September 2024

Is there enough silence for the Word to be heard?

September 2024

(Vol. XXXVII, No. 8)

Dear friends~ This next year my beloved and I will be married 50 years. I have "known" Jackie for more than 53 years, and yet I can still wake up beside her in the morning and realize that this person whom I have walked with over the decades is still a mystery and so much unknown. The truth is that we are growing old together. But if we can embrace our physical diminishment with gentleness and grace, our heart's surrender becomes, as Jackie calls it, "the sacrament of diminishment." This morning she gave me a folder full of her favorite quotes about relationship and love. Here are a few of hers and a sprinkling of mine. ~ Bob

Bob & Jackie Sabath

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Love is frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service. But these things in themselves are not love. Love springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them.

~ Anthony De Mello in THE WAY TO LOVE

This is how we are: we fall in love with each other's strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other's weaknesses.

~ Salman Rushdie in THE GOLDEN HOUSE

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Another name for God is surprise.

~ Brother David Steindl-Rast in GRATEFULNESS, THE HEART OF PRAYER

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

~ Ursula K. LeGuin in THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. It is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.

~ Heidi Priebe in THIS IS ME LETTING YOU GO

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone. We find it with another.

~ Thomas Merton in LOVE AND LIVING

Honestly accept the journey into physical diminishment as the new learning curve in your life and embrace it with curiosity and beginner's mind. Keep facing forward with a gently yielded heart; that is always the direction from which the new integration emerges.

~ Cynthia Bourgeault from the "Ten Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging" essay at WisdomWaypoints.org

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May my heart be opened.

May all that is broken within me be healed.

May I awaken to this moment, just as it is.

May all hearts be opened to one another.

May your heart be opened.

May all that is broken within you be healed.

May you awaken to this moment, just as it is.

May all hearts be opened to one another.

May our hearts be opened.

May all that is broken within us be healed.

May we awaken to this moment, just as it is.

May all hearts be opened to one another.

~ Anonymous

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

~ Sam Keen in TO LOVE AND BE LOVED

When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery – that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are... This kind of unmasking – speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges – is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.

~ John Welwood in LOVE AND AWAKENING

Before fixing what you're looking at, check what you're looking through.

~ Mark Nepo in THE BOOK OF AWAKENING

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

~ Pema Chodron in THE PLACES THAT SCARE YOU

Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now. That's the story. That's the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they're all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, it's why I'll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes.

~ Jack Kerouac from his "The Golden Eternity" letter

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We travelers, walking to the sun, can't see

Ahead, but looking back the very light

That blinded us shows us the way we came,

Along which blessings now appear, risen

As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,

By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward

That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

~ Wendell Berry, "Sabbaths 1999 VI" in GIVEN

True giving is a thoroughly joyous thing to do. We experience happiness when we form the intention to give, in the actual act of giving, and in the recollection of the fact that we have given. Generosity is a celebration. When we give something to someone we feel connected to them, and our commitment to the path of peace and awareness deepens.

~ Sharon Salzberg in A HEART AS WIDE AS THE WORLD

It costs so much to be fully human... One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms... One has to accept pain as a condition of existence... One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

~ Morris West in THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN

Go to the place called barren. Stand in the place called empty. And you will find God there.

~ Joan Sauro in WHOLE EARTH MEDITATION

We are naturally reverent beings, but much of our natural reverence has been torn away from us because we have been born into a world that hurries. There is no time to be reverent with the earth or with each other. We are all hurrying into progress. And for all our hurrying we lose sight of our true nature a little more each day.

~ Macrina Wiederkehr from the "Radical Grace" newsletter by The Center for Action and Contemplation

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Upcoming Retreat: Fierce love and wild wisdom for dark times // October 25-27 near Harpers Ferry, WV We live in a time of endings, among them the demise of a civilization derived from endless growth on a finite planet, the massive extinction of species, and the unraveling of Earth’s beautiful and sustaining web of life. How shall we live well and thrive on this dark edge? Join us to discover the possibilities.

More details can be found HERE

Recently Published: Bob wrote this story on a napkin in the desert of Arizona many years ago during a gathering with Richard Rohr. A few years later he read his story around a bonfire with another group — as a mythic story of his own childhood.

Now available as a children's book on Amazon

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