Ashley

“The essential instruction of centering prayer says, When engaged with your thoughts return ever so gently to the sacred word. As contemplation deepens, you appreciate how important the attitude of gentleness is for letting the living Word of God infuse your practice with the sacred word. Many people struggle with the question “How can I be gentle with the sacred word?” Gentleness is something you learn and practice. You learn gentleness in centering prayer by consciously returning to the sacred word with an ease of spirit. You also learn gentleness in centering prayer by being gentle with yourself when you are effortful. And the best way to learn how to act with gentleness in prayer is to let God teach you. God is gentle. As you let go of thoughts and of thinking about thoughts, you let go of your own strategies about being gentle, and you have space in your awareness for God.”
― David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer: Deepening Your Experience of God

“When a soul achieves a love that fills the whole universe equally, this love must become the chick with golden wings that pierces the egg of the world. After this it loves the universe not from the inside, but from the outside, from the place where our firstborn brother, the Wisdom of God, is seated.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The beauty of the world is the mouth of the labyrinth. Having entered, the unwary ones take a few steps and in a little while are unable to find the opening again. Exhausted, without anything to eat or to drink, in the dark, separated from kin, from everything they love, from everything they know, they walk without any knowledge, any experience, incapable of even discovering whether they are truly walking or just turning around in one place. But this affliction is nothing compared to the danger that menaces them. For if they do not lose courage, they will continue walking, and it is completely certain that they will finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth. And there, God is waiting to eat them! Later they will emerge, changed. Having been eaten and digested by God they become ‘other.’ After that they will be held at the opening of the labyrinth, gently pushing in others who approach.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“the exchange of love is illegitimate if one or the other’s consent does not proceed from the central point of the soul where the ‘yes’ can only be eternal. The obligation of marriage, which is now so often regarded as a simple social convention, is written into the very nature of human thought by the affinity between carnal love and beauty. Everything that has some relationship to beauty should be exempted (unaffected) by the passage of time. Beauty is eternity here below.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux