Prepare for death

"The only ultimate tragedy is a life that has not
opened to eternal life.

In the Christian vision, death is not the all-important
moment in our life. The supreme all-important
moment in any life is the moment of full openness to
Jesus. We have to take practical steps to put
ourselves into readiness.

Anyone who meditates in faith knows that the
journey within takes us out of ourselves. Saying the
mantra is learning to die and to accept the eternal
gift of our being in one and the same act.

Our being passes through various stages of life,
through many deaths, but we can never slip out of
being. God never withdraws the inmortal gift
of live he has given to us. This is the essential
preparation we need in experience to face our
own death withou fear, without false consolation,
with open minds and open hearts.

All death is death to limitation. If we can die to self,
we rise to an infinite liberty of love. This way of
dying to the ego, the first death, is what we call
prayer".

The pearl of great price

"The great grace that all of us have been
given is to
believe in Jesus Christ, to believe in his
presence in
our hearts and to believe that he invites
each of us
to enter into that presence. That is the
extraordinary
gift to have been given.

We have to learn, because it is a gift of such
staggering proportions, to respond to it
gradually,
gently. When we begin we cannot fully
understand
the sheer magnificience and wonder of it.
Each time
we return to meditate we enter iinto that
reality a
little more deeply, a little more faithfully.

When we begin we probably find our way to
meditation as one among many options that we
have
been looking at and it takes us time to find
that this
is the pearl of great price.

I do not wish to imply that meditation is the
only
way, but rather that it is the only way I
have found.
In my experience it is the way of pure
simplicity that
enables us to become fully, integrally aware
of the
Spirit Jesus has sent into our heart. This
is the
recorded experience of the mainstream of the
Christian tradition from apostolic times down
to our
day".