Living water flowing out from within.

Jn 7: 37-38 says If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me; whoever believes in me, let him drink. Streams of living water shall flow out from within...

We can see that our spirituality is not for us alone. If properly attended to, it will flow out from within where it has been nurtured and fed, to spill out for others around us.

It is this concept that gave early monastics their confidence that their lives of prayer were powerful and fruitful for the world. Living in silence and solitude, they offered little to the world of activity. Yet, their lives were considered powerful.

Today, it is harder to convince others of the power of a life of prayer. Today, action and works dominate our culture, so much so that monastic life is seen as introspective and selfish. The attitude is, if we are not DOING something, than what use is our lives?

Yet, from Jesus words, we see that power does not come from works, but from willing abandonment to his will and his words.

I once was told the only person I had control over, the only person I could change, was myself. This concept is part and parcel of the monastic life. You live with yourself in an intimate way. Devoid of the usual distractions of job, family, home, you have to face yourself day after day, live with those glaring faults, come to grips with your bad points as well as your good points. Go forward even when all seems dark. If you give yourself over to the life, you do become transformed into a better person. And how better to change the world than to begin with oneself.

Then, too, you learn how to become deeply spiritual, and communicate with God through a real relationship with Someone neither tangible or containable. In effect, even as you change, you find the presence of God, or better put, the more acute awareness of the presence of God, transforms you whole being.

Never underestimate the good you have the power to do just by living your life of prayer and meditation. And though monastics have the medium for such a life of prayer, they do not hold exclusive rights to contemplation. If you have been baptized in Christ, you have the power to let living waters flow from you into the world around you.