Consent

I do go quiet sometimes. I stop blogging for a minute. As a self professed monk, I think my vocation demands it. 🙂

I say that with a smile because, to be absolutely honest, my time in silence is often my favorite. I do still write, I do still knit, I do still embroider….but, I don’t feel the need to share. This blog is an open diary of my life for anyone and everyone to read. And some thoughts and feelings are meant simply for me and God, especially some of those felt in that quiet, silent embrace.

I’ll put it to you this way. If I’m blogging, I’m spending time with you. If I’m not, I’m spending time with God. And once you feel His presence, it’s very hard to let It go. It feels too good to let go. Your body doesn’t hurt, your mind doesn’t hurt. There is no fear, there is no anxiety, there is no constraint….only consent. Thomas Keating discussed consent in one of his sermons and it was a shift in my own thinking.

You have to consent to God’s love, for God’s love doesn’t make demands. Nor does God’s love require credentials, memberships, earnings.

God only asks that you love Him as equally as He loves you…And when you consent to that love, when you freely hand yourself over to that simple divine principle, then loving everything gets so much easier. Especially loving yourself, your enemies, or anything else you might despite. Everything gets easier once you consent to that love and just let it wash over you like an ice cold shower on a blazing hot day.

If you’re lucky, you’ll enjoy 10 minutes of silence with God and you’ll feel a smile creep across your face. You’ll feel Him in ways that cause butterflies to bloom in your belly. You’ll feel him in ways that make you stop everything, pause, and stop what you’re doing just to experience something like you have ever enjoyed in the physical world. It is an absolute disregard for death and of pain, for it is the eternal presence, the source of ever giving love and every given life.

And if you’re a self professed monk (like myself), those are the moments you crave. Those moments in silence give life to all that you create…the things you make are just manifestations of your time spent alone with God. If you’re a self professed monk, you want to extend that 10 minutes of bliss into something much longer, something that digs deeper into the soul. You’ll structure your life around that desire for silence to invite the Divine….and for the hands to fumble through whatever He should desire be made. We trust His design. We have faith in His plan. We consent to what will be….in His name.

Sorry if I got all preachy on you. Just letting you know why I’ve been quiet. 🙂

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