Eating the hidden bread of God

Live a listening life.  Order your outward life so that nothing drowns out the listening.  There is nothing more precious to preserve, to cultivate.  If you think you haven't time for it, then ask if you are not pursuing secondary values....
I do know that to common men and women like you and me, set in the midst of the wear and tear of life, come times of precious nearness, when the veil between time and Eternity grows thin and one feels the pulse-beat of the love of God.
--Thomas Kelly in The Eternal Now

Howard Macy passed on to me the sequel of The Testament of Devotion (who knew there was one!)--The Eternal Now--and I have been reading it slowly (perhaps in Kelly form). Today his words in the last chapter rise up to meet me like the way home.  Again--this is a theme in my life--the Spirit reminds me that the radiant life comes in the midst of the pressures and struggles of daily life and work, not when those pressures and struggles are released from me.  It seems that the quest is always to gain control over the chaos of life in order to find that place of centered stillness.  But Kelly reminds us that the creative Center, the Eternal Love, flows into the deep springs of our hearts in a life lived with frequent periods of a "relaxed receptivity" to the inner voice of stillness of the Eternal in us.  This listening life opens us to living in a deeper reality--so that we are no longer controlled by the circumstances by our time, but released into a free and non-anxious life of a "glad and calm serenity of will" of complete obedience.  We live as people who do not draw their encouragement from the daily circumstances they find themselves in, but as people who feast on a hidden bread and water that comes from the heart of God.

God of Sarah, Rebekah, Rahab, Ruth, and Mary--"restore unto us they joy of Thy presence and the glorious radiance of Thy beauty.  Teach us, Though inward earthly, time-born pettiness, to walk in simplicity and lowly love all of our days.  Give us Thy cosmic patience.  Blind us to discouragement and anxious fears, that we may put our hands trustingly in Thine, and become incarnate miracles of Eternal Goodness breaking in upon a time-blinded world and a time-blinded church."