The search for God is a very intimate enterprise.  It is at the core of every longing in the human heart.  It is the search for ultimate love, for total belonging, for the meaningful life.  It is our attempt to live life and find it worthwhile, to come to see the presence of God under all the phantoms and shadows—beyond all the illusions of life—and find it enough.

But the search depends, at least in part, on the complex of energies within us that we bring to the challenges of seeking.

We do not all hear the same tones at the same volume, or see the same visions in the same colors, or seek the same goods of life in the same way.  The search for God depends, then, on choosing the spiritual path suited to our own spiritual temper and character….

There is, as a result, more than one way to go about the journey to God.

We may seek God alone, in the silence of our own hearts, where our attention is centered in a keen and conscious way on developing an ear for the leavening penetration in our lives by the mind and word of God.

Another kind of journey to God leads us to seek God with others in a covenantal common life, where by the physical joining of our lives together we become a daily witness to create in the world a community of strangers bound together by the will of God.

In our own time, in a society that is both mobile and connected at the same time, there is still another possible way to make the journey to God—and that is in a Monastery of the Heart.  Here we choose to seek God in step with others—each of us on an apparently separate path and yet all of us in veritable community with one another on the way—as lifelines, as mentors, as brothers and sisters in whose loving company we choose to make our journey to God.

-- From The Monastery of the Heart by Joan Chittister