Quotes from Martin Laird

Wisdom, health, life and love cannot be found in trying to control the wind, but rather in harnessing the wind in the sails of receptive engagement of the present moment.

God in Christ has taken into Himself the brokenness of the human condition. Hence, human woundedness, brokenness, death itself are transformed from dead ends to doorways into Life. In the divinizing humanity of Christ, bruises become balm.

But gradually we learn something very precious under the tutelage of these wounds. We learn a compassion for others that replaces judging, self-loathing, and the compulsion to find someone to blame. We learn a reverent joy before our wounds that replaces the condemnation of and comparison of ourselves with others that used to fuel our anxiety. We learn that the consummation of self-esteem is self-forgetful abandonment to the Silence of God that gives birth to loving service of all who struggle.

Dying is all about letting go and letting be, as is the awareness of God. People who have traveled far along the contemplative path are often aware that the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes. Union is seen to be the fundamental reality and separateness a highly filtered mental perception.

By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies. —Isaiah 30:15

In this depthless depth we are caught up in a unity that grounds, affirms, and embraces all diversity. Communion with God and communion with others are realizations of the same Center. And this Center, according to the ancient definition, is everywhere. "God is that reality whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Instead we experience reactive commentaries on thoughts and feelings. The ability to meet with stillness all that appears and disappears in awareness will gradually (very gradually) replace this deeply ingrained pattern of meeting experiences with reactive commentary.

Our self-forgetful gaze on God is immersed in God's self-emptying gaze on us, and in this mutual meeting we find rest.

Why do we rush about… looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?

a remarkably gentle and insightful monk, Theophan, who says, "You must descend from your head to your heart. At present your thoughts of God are in your head. And God Himself is, as it were, outside you, and so your prayer and other spiritual exercises remain exterior. Whilst you are still in your head, thoughts will not easily be subdued but will always be whirling about, like snow in winter or clouds of mosquitoes in the summer.

Union with God is not something that needs to be acquired but realized.

The more we journey towards the Center the closer we are both to God and to each other. The problem of feeling isolated from both God and others is overcome in the experience of the Center. This journey into God and the profound meeting of others in the inner ground of silence is a single movement. Exterior isolation is overcome in interior communion

Whatever there is about human identity that can be objectively known, measured, predicted, observed, whether by the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the tax man, or the omniscient squint of your most insightful aunt, there is a foundational core of what we might as well call identity that remains hidden from scrutiny's grip and somehow utterly caught up in God, "in whom we live and move and have our being," in whom our very self is immersed.

the more we realize we are one with God the more we become ourselves, just as we are, just as we were created to be.

Union with God respects all distinctions between creation and Creator and is characterized by awareness of the presence and the transparency of perceived boundaries.

This book, by contrast, proceeds from an ancient Christian view that the foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18:14), where God simply and perpetually gives Himself, This Self-gift is manifested in the creation, in the people of God and their inspired (if stumbling) pursuit of a just society, and most fully, in the Christian view of things, in Jesus Christ.

Preaching on the Eucharist in his Homily on the Feast of Pentecost, Augustine says to his congregation, "You are the mystery that is placed upon the Lord's table. You receive the mystery that is yourself. To that which you are, you will respond, Amen.

Symptoms of growth may look like breakdown or derangement; the more we are allowed by the love of others and by self-understanding to live through our derangement into the new arrangement, the luckier we are. It is unfortunate when our anxiety over what looks like personal confusion or dereliction blinds us to the forces of liberation at work.

The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word.