Stability

Last night in our discussion of Benedictine spirituality we considered how Saint Benedict taught about the need for stability. In Seeking God, Esther de Waal writes

We...live lives punctuated by the constant expectations of a busy life which, from the ringing of the alarm in the morning until the turning of the latch in the door at night, is made up of situations, encounterers, demands which we often would never have chosen and would much prefer to evade if we could. Yet it is just within these limitations that we shall find God. The difficulty is that recognizing that and then putting it into practice is simply not easy.

She also quotes Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Bishop Anthony Bloom who wrote

You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere, that you do not need to seek Him elsewhere, that He is here, and if you do not find Him here it is useless to go and search for Him elsewhere because it is not Him that is absent from us, it is we who are absent from Him...It is important to recognize that it is useless to seek God somewhere else. If you cannot find Him here you will not find Him anywhere else. This is important because it is only at the moment that you recognize this that you can truly find the fullness of the Kingdom of God in all its richness within you; that God is present in every situation and every place, that you will be able to say, "So then I shall stay where I am."