I believe that the great challenges of our time require deep inner work as well as courageous outer action.  If we stay on the surface of things, it feels natural to act in ways that are approved by the dominant culture.  Contemplative prayer, meditation, and other spiritual practices can help equip us for resistance to forces that would have us conform to the status quo.

Often in prayer what I hear when I listen is silence.  People sometimes interpret God’s silence as the absence of God.   Not me.  I understand God as the Ground of Being, as Love itself, in whom we live and move and have our being, so there’s nowhere for God to go.  I have let go of expectations.   Spending time with Spirit is enough.   Settling into darkness–listening to the silence of God.

Sometimes I feel the love or gain an insight or find clarity about some decision or sense a nudge in a particular direction or feel moved to make a course correction.  But the most familiar answer to my prayer and my most familiar form of prayer is immersion in silence.

It is here, in the silence, that I hear the still, small voice of God, a barely discernible movement of Spirit almost below the level of consciousness, a dynamic darkness, a pervasive sense of peace, an invitation to stay awake and pay attention to what’s going on below the surface, a reminder to live life at its depths.  An answer to prayer:  the silence of God.