By gazing at His grandeur...

"Let's strive to make more progress in self-knowledge, for in my opinion we shall never completely know ourselves if we don't strive to know God.  By gazing at His grandeur, we get in touch with our own lowliness; by looking at His purity, we shall see our own filth; by pondering His humility, we shall see how far we are from being humble. -(Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, second mansion, par. 9)

         The above text from the Master of prayer empresses me so much.  St. Teresa of Avila was a women who always teaches us to become more human, to go down deep within us, to discover the inner space God prepared for us so that we may be able to meet Him there.  This texts for me is somewhat the same from the lines of Socrates "the unexamined life is not worth living" and the words of St. Augustine when he says "enter into yourself and you will see that your heart is restless till it rests in God".  All of these ideas evolve mainly on the knowledge of the self, and of God. Like all the other, they wanted to let us understand that we cannot fathom and grasp the fullness of ourselves not unless we first know who we are, from the basic.  This is why I like it so much because St. Teresa of Avila teaches us that we have to strive to make more progress in knowing ourselves.  What does it mean? 

Eleven years today! June 13, 2013

  

    For Eleven years I left home. For eleven years I left my family, my friends and my love ones. For eleven years I broke the hearts of the two men I love. For eleven years I died to myself, my wants, my ambitions and stepped on the greatest desire that cries in the central fortress of my soul...to be with my King!

     I detached and forget everything and let myself absorbed in Him...in His Love...in His will..in His hands...though many times i struggled, cried, and wanted to give up and go back to the pleasures of yesterdays but He keeps on telling me "You are mine". The self you yearn to be, but fear to know. The world from which you flee in Me find home. All these I give you, if you remain in Me. I am always with you and be faithful to you forever....today those words are still fresh on my ears.

An advice to a friend who admitted to be continuously distracted during prayer.

When I got an encounter with a friend who admitted to be continuously distracted during prayer, St. Teresa of Avila comes to mind.  With our discussion, I explained to her the three stages of prayer in terms of what we seek.  In the first stage we seek knowledge of God and of ourselves, in the second- experience, and third transformation.  Then, as we go through it, we started in the first stage by letting her make an examination of conscience, the need for self-knowledge by checking whether her distractions is due to some negligence that has crept into her life.  She may have grown careless in her fidelity to a daily time of prayer, or she may not be coming to prayer properly prepared and disposed.  Maybe the negligence were in terms of disordered attachments in her active life: a festering resentment over some hurt, a preoccupation with her own success in some endeavor or a friendship that is competing with the Lord for the center of attention.