Where soul meets life

I lifted up the small foam pumpkin before walking into A Novel Idea Bookstore two weeks ago during their fall sale.

“What did you get?” the employee manning the table asked me.

I showed her the bottom of the pumpkin. “Oooooh…that’s a good one! 30% off every book inside. Happy hunting!”

I’ve participated in this sale each year for the past four years and have usually selected a 20% or 30% off pumpkin, but never lifted one to reveal a coveted 40% or 50% discount. I was satisfied with the discount I’d selected and looked forward to saving a decent amount of money when I walked inside. Would it be one of the large leatherbound volumes I’d looked at the previous week when doing my advance shopping in anticipation of this sale? Might I purchase one of the large and very expensive Shakespeare folios the bookstore recently acquired from a seller?

It turned out to be neither. When I exited the store forty-five minutes later I had purchased a small one hundred page softcover book by Russian author Catherine de Hueck Doherty that had listed for $4. It was the best $2.80 I have spent in a long while. This little book as supplemented beautifully my recent immersion into books on silence and prayer.

From her book Molchanie: The Silence of God:

“When we reach the silver sands and plunge into the great sea of God’s silence, we begin to understand that he alone is God – Lover, Friend, the totality of gentleness, peace, and rest. He calls us and we cannot resist that call. We have to be alone with him. It is a necessity, it is a hunger. It has been said that prayer is a hunger. But this Christ walks with loneliness and rejection, and so must we.”

Silence
Is a dark night
Where first
The soul
Meets its death to self.

Where noise
Cannot abide
Not noise of word
But thoughts.

Silence is a school
Of Love and death
That leads to
Light.

Silence
Is a dark night
Where Soul and mind
Abide
To wait
For light
That is God’s speech.

Silence
Is a school of
Love and death
Where soul
Meets life.

Silence
Is the key
To the immense
Furnace of Love–
The heart of
God.

Silence is
Speech
Of passionate love
Spent
In the arms of God.

Silence Is–
One-ness
With the Lord!

__________

Photo credit: Kinnoull Monastery