Amid all the chaos we are experiencing these days we’re also surrounded by hearts and cupids and loving cards. So it seems on one level at least love is in the air.  This puts New York Times best-selling author Margaret Renki right in the thick of things when she writes in her memoir, The Comfort of Crows “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” The issue these days, however is, remaining “beauty-besotted so as to be icons of the God-like love for the world. How can we meet this challenge?

The silence experienced in contemplative practice is surely one means to do this. Far surpassing the mere absence of words or sounds, and transcending the tendency to turn away from suffering, the silence experienced in contemplative practice morphs, as Thomas Keating tells us, into Presence which breaks open our hearts. It’s as if we are living with our hearts outside our bodies as we sense and feel keenly both the piercing grief and heart-wrenching beauty of our world and its peoples and creatures. This is risky business as Renki reminds us in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times when she asks, “How can we keep letting our hearts be broken without becoming broken forever?”

Hafiz, the 14th-century Persian poet can help us here as he asks, “How did the rose ever open its heart and give the world all its beauty?” His response, “It felt the encouragement of light against its being, otherwise we all remain too frightened. “  Through the silence of contemplative practice we too, like the rose,  feel the encouragement of Light against our being and so are empowered to keep finding a reason to keep loving the world. Keep sitting.

Margaret and Nancy