Letting go of everything for this

I was going to say that I have been finding the following useful as a meditation for the beginning of Lent - but it is actually more that it turned up on the threshold of my consciousness like an old friend and seems to have decided to stay awhile ...  

I see the face

that was my home.

My loving says, I will let go

of everything for that.

My soul begins to keep rhythm

as if music is playing.

My reason says, What do you call

this cypress-energy that straightens

what was bent double?

All things change in this presence.

Armenians and Turks no longer know

which is which.

Soul keeps unfolding inward.

The body leaves the body.

A wealth you cannot imagine

flows through you.

Do not consider what strangers say.

Be secluded in your secret heart-house,

that bowl of silence.

Talking, no matter how humble-seeming,

is really a kind of bragging.

Let silence be the art

you practice.

Rumi (1207-1273)

Trans. Coleman Barks

And then this piece - from a book lent to me by a friend ...

"To know God as the wholeness of love is to enter into oneness at the heart of all life. That is why prayer and contemplation are essential for the next stage of evolution. Without the eye of the heart or the inner space to welcome the new ways love shows itself in others, we cannot love toward greater unity …"

  

Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love, p.112-113.

Wherever and whoever you are, whatever your circumstances:

Peace be with you.