[Don Salmon]

Hey Dan, quite beautiful. I’m all for lots of words as poetry for evoking the sacred and sublime.

At the risk of terribly oversimplifying, it seems to me what you’re doing is inviting us to the experience of God (a RH vs LH shift) in and as all things; what St Paul referred to as recognizing God as that “in which we live and move and have our being.”

What you’re doing also reminds me of lectio Divina, or “Divine reading,” inviting us to contemplate the text not so much to understand it intellectually but to read it as a way of diving into and dwelling more deeply into the Divine presence.

On the other hand, no words is good too. I attended the first ever “Centering Prayer” mass back in 1981 at a small church on the southern edge of Manhattan (NYC). Basil Pennington, one of the leaders of the contemplative Christian movement at the time, celebrated the mass.

After the opening songs and prayers, he stepped up to give his homily, but instead of speaking, he sat in silence for 20 minutes.

And then he spoke the Our Father:

I remember, hearing the “Our………Father…..” i felt I had never truly heard the Lord’s Prayer until that moment, every word, every syllable informed by that 20 minutes of deeply contemplative Silence.