Instruction 
Instruction on the Rule by noteworthy modern day monastics or oblates
Love cannot come of emptiness
I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, “after just one more… Read More ›
Seeking God Perfectly
This is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of… Read More ›
Solitude is a necessity
You must be free, and not involved. Solitude is to be preserved not as a luxury but as a necessity: not for “perfection” so much as for simple “survival” in the life God has given you. Hence, you must know when, how, and to whom you must say “no.” This involves considerable difficulty at times…. Read More ›
What do you think is the way to Contemplation?
Do you think the way to sanctity is to lock yourself up with your prayers and your books and the meditations that please and interest your mind, to protect yourself with many walls, against people you consider stupid? Do you think the way to contemplation is found in the refusal of activities and works which… Read More ›
Finding Inner Solitude
You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world. Do everything you can to avoid the noise and the business of men. Keep as far away as you can from the… Read More ›
The Silence of the World is Real
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement… Read More ›
Fruitful Silence
Life is not to be regarded as an uninterrupted flow of words which is finally silenced by death. Its rhythm develops in silence, comes to the surface in moments of necessary expression, returns to deeper silence, culminates in a final declaration, then ascends quietly into the silence of Heaven which resounds with unending praise. Those… Read More ›
True-Self even in our thoughts
Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior word must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else’s sun, still less is there any justification… Read More ›
The first step toward finding God
Man’s intelligence, however we may misuse it, is far too keen and too sure to rest for long in error. It may embrace a lie and cling to it stubbornly, believing it to be true: but it cannot find true rest in falsehood. The mind that is in love with error wears itself out with… Read More ›
We are the Champion Idolaters of all History
Reading the Vulgate I run across the Latin word simulacrum which has implications of a mask-like deceptiveness, of intellectual cheating, of an ideological shell-game. The word simulacrum, it seems to me, presents itself as a very suggestive one to describe an advertisement, or an over-inflated political presence, or that face on the TV screen. The… Read More ›