In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and personal connection with the divine.
Johannes Tauler's quote encourages individuals to engage in introspection to uncover the barriers that hinder their relationship with God. By advocating for prayerful silence and self-inquiry, it highlights the belief that true understanding and connection with the divine come from within, urging each person to listen to their own heart for guidance.
In practice
During a spiritual retreat, you might share this quote to encourage participants to reflect on their personal relationship with the divine.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.
If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
America was founded by people who believe that God was their rock of safety. I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that God is on our side, but I think it's all right to keep asking if we're on His side.
Disciples will not be weakened by suffering, worn down, and embittered until they are broken. Instead, they bear suffering, by the power of him who supports them. The disciples bear the suffering laid on them only by the power of him who bears all suffering on the cross. As bearers of suffering, they stand in communion with the Crucified.
I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.
These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.
There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
Some foreign investors accuse us of being unfair to shareholders by using our resources for community development. Yes, this is money that could have made for dividend payouts, but it also is money that's uplifting and improving the quality of life of people in the rural areas where we operate and work. We owe them that.
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