Flos Carmeli

I sometimes feel like a voyeur, reading about your personal journey to holiness, Steven. You expose so much of yourself, I can only sit back and admire your courage. I would feel like a clumsy intruder to comment on posts of that nature. But I will tell you this: I do read them, and they have a strong positive influence on me, as I struggle to discover my own inner life.

Shalom.

LOL at "I shouldn't even publish this, but I will because I've adopted a version of Mark Shea's motto--'that no idiotic stray thought go unrecorded.'"

That should be my motto too.

It's an old saw but ne'er take silence for lack of readership. I was moved yesterday by the third-to-last paragraph in your "Sobering Prospect" post and captured it for STG purposes.

I loved Shea's motto from the beginning ... and inadvertently already was following it (of course, one must take into account how many of my thoughts are idiotic ... but I still love to share!)

Steven,

I was much enriched by what you wrote. And impressed that you could hear those things - it is so easy to bercome deaf to the repetitive parts of the Office. I did not comment because I went off to pray instead. More than once.

Sometimes silence is provoked.

You worry too much about your audience. Get more focussed on the Lord and not yourself.

Dear Katherine,

I probably didn't express the fullness of my thought particularly well, but I took it as a good sign that there was such a clamorous silence. Usually when that happens I've said something that was worth saying. The msre active conversation occurs when I say something stupid that I need to have corrected, or when I'm engaging in fluff. The silence made me think that I needed to go back and read what I had written.

(Following on the Charismatic post--I was tagged as an "exhorter" or "prophet" among the group. The curious thing was (and it exists to this day) once I've said or written what needs to be said or written, it completely leaves my mind. If you had asked me before this morning, when I read them again what I had written yesterday, I couldn't have been able to tell you. When there was this wonderful silence, I knew that I had written something worth reading again. (Well, maybe not all that much, but more than usual.)

But you see even by this confused response, I couldn't possibly have posted this for people to read because they'd still be parsing it out.

No, silence is almost always a good sign--people are thinking not necessarily responding. I've learned to take that much silence as a lesson and to return to see what God has for me in what was written.

Odd, isn't it?

shalom,

Steven

I've never really cared for coconut.

Tom threw out a non-sequitor that logically follows! You don't see that every day.