Pat Schneider

Jesus said, __ut when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

If we can't forget, how can we forgive? I believe that forgiving can't be done by willpower alone. I can will myself to write out my own memories and feelings. I can will myself to imagine onto the page how someone else may have felt. I can will myself to research someone else's life in order to better understand what happened. But I don't think I can forgive by simply willing to forgive. Forgiving happens to us when our hearts are ready. Sometimes it takes the form of working on our own story until quietly, often surprisingly, we simply let go of the hurt. Sometimes forgiving makes it possible to pick up the pieces of a broken relationship and begin again. Sometimes it means letting a relationship go. We can't forgive through willpower. What we can do is work toward readiness of heart. Writing as a spiritual practice can be that kind of work.When our heart is ready, we often don't even know it until forgiveness happens within us. It is a gift.

Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can__ believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.

Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.

God__ love is God__ attention.

Putting words onto paper__hen it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection__s a holy act.

She begins, __hat is the question we spend our entire lives asking?_ and answers, __ur question is this: Are we loved? I don__ mean by one another._ She closes her sermon to the snakes with these words: __ am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun__ slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.

The panther that has stalked yousince you were a childis old now. No longer wild,and tired of guarding the treasureyou yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to youif you just let her go.

It is a kind of love, is it not?How the cup holds the tea,How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,How the floor receives the bottoms of shoesOr toes. How soles of feet knowWhere they're supposed to be.I've been thinking about the patienceOf ordinary things, how clothesWait respectfully in closetsAnd soap dries quietly in the dish,And towels drink the wetFrom the skin of the back.And the lovely repetition of stairs.And what is more generous than a window?

It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.