Rebecca and the Cliff

My twelve year old cousin, Rebecca, was walking the big family dog near a cliff when we were visiting in West Virginia. They were not walking but running. All of a sudden she saw in front of her a cliff that they could just go over precipitously. The only thing she could do to stop was to sit right down on the ground which she did.

In the complexity of today’s world it is easy to fall off a cliff into a life of perpetual motion. A life that often leads to confusion of mind and heart. The need is to sit down. As Master Eckhart says, we need to have as much interiority as exteriority. And even in our interiority we need time just to rest in God, in total trust in the great Love that God has for us. When we trust God we are entering mystery. We are in God and God is in us. This is what Jesus has promised us. Abide in me as I abide in you. It was a promise that for the Apostles was beyond understanding. Then Jesus rose from the dead. Even then it was not so much a matter of understanding but of believing the words of Jesus because He had risen from the dead and that wonderful witness was quite enough to have them trust in his great Love.

Paul writes: If Christ be not risen from the dead we are of all people the most foolish. (1 Cor, 15) This is why we sit in silence. Why we make the time just to be with God in prayer. We trust our God enough to avoid going off the cliff by sitting down with God in meditative prayer.. We acknowledge consciously the reality that God is present. Then we just repeat a simply prayer word or phrase. And let go of all thinking, imagining, worrying, going over the past or planning the future. Even 10 minutes is good. But twenty minutes twice a day is better.

We are living the paradox of the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Paul expresses this in another way. He says: when I am weak then I am strong. So what looks like the weakness of just praying repetitively is actually relying so much on God that the Divine energy of Love can work freely in us. And that is our true strength.