… watching for the brushstrokes of God
“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God.” ~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Where do you hold space for mystery?
“Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.
The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering.
…
I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.” ~ Edward Hirsch
How do you walk with mystery?
“It came to me, recently, that faith is ‘a certain widening of the imagination.’ When Mary asked the angel, ‘How shall these things be?’ She was asking God to widen the imagination. All my life I’ve been requesting the same thing — a baptized imagination that has a wide enough faith to see the numinous in the ordinary. Without discarding reason, or analysis, I seek from my muse, the Holy Spirit, images that will open up reality and pull me in to the center.” ~ Lucy Shaw
How are you pulled in to the center?
“We must be willing to constantly sit on the edge of mystery and unlearn what has helped guide us in the past but is no longer as useful now. To do this we must be willing to ask the questions that will open us up to hear the quiet, powerful voice of freedom.” ~ Robert Wicks, Crossing the desert
What are your questions to open up?
Both the monk and artist are edge dwellers, ones who commit to living in fertile border spaces and who call the wider community to alternative ways of being beyond the status quo… Living on the edges means recognizing those places and experiences that do not offer easy answers, those fierce edges of life where things are not as clear as we hope them to be. ~ Christine Valters Paintner, Abbey of the Arts
How do you hold mystery and questions?
“To speak, and to write, is to assert who we are and what we think. The necessary other side is to surrender to these things — to stand humbled and stunned and silent before the wild and inexplicable beauties and mysteries of being.” ~ Jane Hirshfield
How do you surrender to the mystery?
With the Eyes of the Heart 