Contemplative Prayer Quotes

“God in Christ has taken into Himself the brokenness of the human condition. Hence, human woundedness, brokenness, death itself are transformed from dead ends to doorways into Life. In the divinizing humanity of Christ, bruises become balm.”
― Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation

“Go deeply into the urge to be silent and not the mental interference of how, where and when. If you follow silence to its source you can be taken by it in a moment.”
― Jean Klein, Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest

“The story is told of Mother Theresa that when an interviewer asked her. "What do you say when you pray?" she answered, "I listen." The reporters paused a moment, then asked, "Then what does God say?" and she replied, "He listens." It is hard to imagine a more succinct way to get at the intimacy of contemplative prayer.”
― Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

“We all deserve to get away and have some peace; and others deserve the peace of us getting out of their way!”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“Meditation has nothing to do with achieving a result. It is not a matter of breathing in a particular way, or looking at your nose, or awakening the power to perform certain tricks, or any of the rest of that immature nonsense…. Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried along by the wind—to be choicelessly aware of all that is part of meditation.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti

“Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills.”
― Ray Simpson, Exploring Celtic Spirituality

“To begin with, it seems like an effort to keep returning to the welcoming presence, but at some point it is so natural that it seems to require an effort to leave it. It feels like home. We no longer feel that we need to be entertained.”
― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

“When we really want to hear, and be heard by, someone we love, we do not go rushing into noisy crowds. Silence is a form of intimacy. That’s how we experience it with our friends and lovers. As relationships grow deeper and more intimate, we spend more and more quiet time alone with our lover. We talk in low tones about the things that matter. We do not shout them to each other. We may shout about them to others, but quietness is the hallmark of love.”
― J. Brent Bill, Holy Silence: The Gift Of Quaker Spirituality

“When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting...you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.”
― Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See

“In short, zazen is seeing this world from the casket, without me.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Deep inquiry leads to contemplation, or prayer. Through dedicated contemplation we can attune to consciousness, the light which constitutes all phenomena. This light is our intrinsic nature. Our being is always shining. Our real nature is openness, listening, release, surrender without producing or will. Prayer or contemplation is welcoming free from projection and expectation. It is without demand and formulation. It invites the object to unfold in you and reveals your openness to you. Live with this opening, this vastness. Attune yourself to it. It is love. Ardent contemplation brings you to living meditation so ultimately they are one.”
― Jean Klein, Who Am I?: The Sacred Quest

“God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.”
― Thomas Keating O C S O

“Learn to listen to subtle cues from your spirit instead of the barrage coming from your brain.”
― David Brazzeal, Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul

“Remember when, as a very young baby, you had just been changed and fed and were not tired enough to sleep. What does a baby do in such a situation? It is simply present without any intention. That’s meditation.”
― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

“True happiness ensues indirectly. It always appears in a state of non-search.”
― Ilie Cioara, The Wondrous Journey: Into the Depth of Our Being

“It is by being awake to God in us that we can increasingly see God in the world around us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

“If he hadn’t become a Buddhist monk, Sawaki Roshi would have been successful in a worldly sense in business, politics, or the military. Instead, he devoted his life to wholeheartedly practicing Dogen Zenji’s just sitting, or shikantaza, which according to him was good for nothing. For him, social climbing in pursuit of fame and profit was meaningless. The Japanese expression for “waste” is bonifuru, which means “sacrifice,” “lose all,” or “ruin.” So when we say he wasted his life, we use the expression in a paradoxical way—like saying that zazen is good for nothing.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Contemplative prayer removes us from the driver's seat.”
― Ed Cyzewski, Flee, Be Silent, Pray: An Anxious Evangelical Finds Peace with God through Contemplative Prayer

“My principal purpose here is to point out again, yet more insistently, that one cannot meaningfully consider, much less investigate, the reality of God except in a manner appropriate to the kind of reality God has traditionally been understood to be. Contemplative discipline, while not by any means the only proper approach to the mystery of God, is peculiarly suited to (for want of a better word) an 'empirical' exploration of that mystery. If God is the unity of infinite being and infinite consciousness, and the reason for the reciprocal transparency of finite being and finite consciousness each to the other, and the ground of all existence and all knowledge, then the journey toward him must also ultimately be a journey toward the deepest source of the self. As Symeon the New Theologian was fond of observing, he who is beyond the heavens is found in the depths of the heart; there is nowhere to find him, William Law (1686–1761) was wont to say, but where he resides in you; for Ramakrishna (1836–1886), it was a constant refrain that one seeks for God only in seeking what is hidden in one’s heart; (...) The practice of contemplative prayer, therefore, is among the highest expressions of rationality possible, a science of consciousness and of its relation to the being of all things, (...)”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“In my experience, those who make the most theatrical display of demanding 'proof' of God are also those least willing to undertake the specific kinds of mental and spiritual discipline that all the great religious traditions say are required to find God. If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some 'experimental' or 'empirical' demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve any sort of real certainty regarding a reality that is nothing less than the infinite coincidence of absolute being, consciousness, and bliss. In short, one must pray: not fitfully, not simply in the manner of a suppliant seeking aid or of a penitent seeking absolution but also according to the disciplines of infused contemplation, with real constancy of will and a patient openness to grace, suffering states of both dereliction and ecstasy with the equanimity of faith, hoping but not presuming, so as to find whether the spiritual journey, when followed in earnest, can disclose its own truthfulness and conduct one into communion with a dimension of reality beyond the ontological indigence of the physical. No one is obliged to make such an effort; but, unless one does, any demands one might make for evidence of the reality of God can safely be dismissed as disingenuous, and any arguments against belief in God that one might have the temerity to make to others can safely be ignored as vacuous.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Meditation means to let the word descend from our minds into our hearts and thus to become enfleshed.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith

“We remain free, however, to listen to God's communication or not to listen, and free to respond or not to respond to what we hear. When we speak of contemplative prayer, we are speaking at the same time of awareness of this communication by God and of a willingness to listen and respond. Conscious relationship begins when I choose to listen to or to look at what the other is doing. After I have made this choice, I then freely decide whether to respond or not. Thus, by contemplative prayer we mean the conscious willingness and desire to look at and listen to God as God wishes to be for me and to respond. I may accept or reject God's initiative. in either case I have responded. When this process occurs, the person has the 'foodstuff' for beginning spiritual direction." (p. 34”
― William A. Barry

“(Mother Teresa) said one must have great love to take up her cross every day and follow in faith her Beloved Jesus. Only such love can make the life possible. Attraction for the religious life is not sufficient. Any girl who comes “to seek peace” is to be carefully and seriously tested, as is one who “loves solitude”. Aptitude also was rated far below the supreme test of love and determination to strive for perfection. Aptitude, or general fitness for the life, is absolutely necessary, but aptitude without a personal love of Our Lord is not sufficient. … And she always added that a person who chooses marriage is not by any means barred from the life of Christian perfection, for there are many saints in the kitchens, factories and offices of the world. Not all the contemplatives are found in the cloister; among the priests and nuns engaged in the active apostolate, there are contemplatives and there are contemplatives in the world.”
― Mother Catherine Thomas of Divine Providence, My Beloved: The Story of a Carmelite Nun

“There are three stages of spiritual development,' a teacher taught. 'The carnal, the spiritual, and the divine.'
'What is the carnal stage?' the disciple asked.
'That's the stage,' the teacher said, 'when trees are seen as trees and mountains are seen as mountains.'
'And the spiritual?' the disciple asked eagerly.
'That's when we look more deeply into things. Then trees are no longer trees and mountains are no longer mountains,' the teacher answered.
'And the divine?' the disciple said breathlessly.
'Ah,' the teacher said with a smile. 'That's enlightenment - when the trees become trees again the and the mountains become mountains.'

We pray to see life as it is, to understand it, and to make it better than it was. We pray so that reality can break into our souls and give us back our awareness of the Divine Presence in life. We pray to understand things as they are, not to ignore and avoid and deny them.

We pray so that when the incense disappears we can still see the world as holy.”
― Joan Chittister

“Prayer does not change God; prayer changes us. God is perfect and constant—absolute. We pray to experience God.”
― Elizabeth C. Dixon, Little Book of Prayers for New Thought Christians

“Perhaps the small, elderly brother mutely splitting firewood and stacking it in a buckling, corrugated-iron water tank was heard in Heaven more compellingly than the rest of us put together. Maybe there comes a time when the one who lives to pray at last steps over an invisible threshold and into a place where liturgical form, word and gesture dissolve. Where feeding scraps of stale bread to a young magpie translates into intercession that is as fervent as it is unobserved, as effective as it is inexplicable.”
― Peter Robertson, The Abbot’s Shoes: Seeking a Contemplative Life

“... both slow making and slow writing are multi-step procedures that play out according to rhythms of activity, contemplation, and rest.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe, followed by a general process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, the truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves. This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer.”
― Richard Rohr, Just This

“This is an invitation to a kind of prayer many of us aren't used to. It's here we learn to be a soul, to dwell in deeper places, and to brave opening ourselves up to Love in ways we may have never done before. It's here, in our growing into the intermingling life promised by Jesus, that we discover prayer as nakedness, as liberating acceptance, as relent.”
― Strahan Coleman, Thirsting: Quenching Our Soul's Deepest Desire

“Listening. It's not something for which Protestants are usually well known. In our activist piety we have tended toward prophetic pronouncements rather than quiet listening. As Father Guy, one of the first monks I met, put it, "Samuel said, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant is listening'; we more often say, 'Listen, Lord, for thy servant is speaking.”
― Dennis Okholm, Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants