In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and personal connection with the divine.
Johannes Tauler's quote encourages individuals to engage in introspection to uncover the barriers that hinder their relationship with God. By advocating for prayerful silence and self-inquiry, it highlights the belief that true understanding and connection with the divine come from within, urging each person to listen to their own heart for guidance.
In practice
During a spiritual retreat, you might share this quote to encourage participants to reflect on their personal relationship with the divine.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.
If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.
Where the state begins, individual liberty ceases, and vice versa.
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.
I don't believe what the papers are saying They're just out to capture my dime, Exaggerating this, exaggerating that.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.
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