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TAKE TIME TO CONTEMPLATE
Sr. Gloria Korhonen, OP
Greetings from the Adrian Dominican Motherhouse. This is an environment
in which one is easily reminded of the Dominican charism, and the emphasis on the search for TRUTH, wherever it is. St. Dominic, eight centuries ago, formed traveling preachers to combat the heresies of that time. Sending out preachers two by two was a radical idea, for friars then lived only in monasteries. But because of errors in the teaching of faith, he emphasized the preaching of the Church’s truth by two monks “on the road.”
A phrase that has long belonged to the Dominican Order is “Contemplata Aliis Tradere”
— “To give to others the fruits of contemplation.” We know that contemplation is abou the highest activity of the human person. One can list many miraculous abilities given to humans....the marvelous living physical body, mental skills, intelligence insights, and more. But we sense that contemplation is at an indescribable level of its own.
We turn to the description by Thomas Merton in his “Seeds of Contemplation.”
“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source.”