A spiritual posture is an attitude or mindset. It’s how we choose to view the world around us and our place in it. Pace embraces a Spiritual Posture of presence and awareness embodied by Spiritual Practices of contemplation and action.
Presence
God is “closer to me than I am to myself”, wrote Augustine. The divine is the heart of all creation; we “live and breath and have our being in God’ (Acts 17:28), just as we would move through the waters of the sea. To experience genuine presence is to be still, silent and, sometimes, in solitude. To experience the presence of the divine requires that we make ourselves available to God, that we disconnect, switch off, remove ourselves from the busyness and noise of life.
As God is eternally present to us through the universal Christ, we seek to be present to ourselves, gently nourishing our souls, pursuing dreams, sustaining our bodies and families, living lives of formation and pilgrimage. We search out others to whom we are called to be present, humbly striving to be the hands and feet of Christ to them, meeting them when and where their lives have taken them, offering friendship, love and communion. In this we aim to be present to the world, listening with our hearts for the presence of God and the invitation of God to participate in and contribute to the making of a world that is whole, reconciled, one, at peace. As the ancient Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, wrote of presence, “it’s all about love melting into love.” We live in presence seeking to draw the attention of others by raising awareness.
Awareness
The Franciscan Mystic, Richard Rohr, writes, “we are already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.” Spiritual awareness requires an open heart, an open mind, open arms.
We seek awareness through the practices of contemplative prayer and incarntional mysticism. Spiritual awareness invites vulnerability, the human capacity to humble oneself before the great mystery of life. A spiritual posture of awareness encourages the contemplative to draw inspiration from the interior life, the deep, expansive “interior castle” (St Teresa of Avila). Pace embraces the breadth and depth of interior awareness, searching always for a deeper sense of wholeness and peace.
We joyfully celebrate the pervasive, creative, unifying essence of creation. We practice awareness of self, our gifts and limitations and the ways in which our thoughts, words and deeds effect others and the world around us. We are aware of others, their gifts and hopes, working always to be at one with our neighbour, sensitive to their vulnerability. We are acutely aware of the world in which we live, the social, cultural, economic and political circumstances shaping our world and prayerfully strive to practice holistic, reconciling awareness in our daily lives.
We seek to nourish and sustain our spiritual posture through spiritual practices of contemplation and action.