Tag: silence
Cannot find true rest in falsehood
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 ›
The Seed of Solitude
Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene. Breathe God’s air. Work, if you can, under His sky. But if you have to live in a city and work among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and… Read More ›
Silent retreats’ rising popularity poses a challenge: How to handle the quiet
The headline in the monthly Ward 5 newspaper described what sounded like an antidote to the nonstop iPhone-checking, list-making, ladder-climbing, goal-setting, Washington mind-set: “Refuge for the Metropolitan Hermit.” The article described a postage stamp of a cabin, urbanely designed and gloriously sunlit, standing alone amid four acres of maples and white oaks on a protected… Read More ›
The Tragic Heroism of Pope Pius XII
There are commentators on the sports channels whose numbing dialogues would never be confused with the Algonquin Round Table. These are the so-called Monday Morning Quarterbacks. Some historians quarterback that way. Pope Pius XII, hailed in his lifetime as a protector of persecuted people, has suffered in reputation from lax minds who never exercised themselves… Read More ›
St. Benedict for Beginners – ‘In a Flood of Words…’
‘In a flood of words you will not avoid sin.’ The Trappists are the Benedictine monks who are most famous for their silence. The stricter orders still have an elaborate system of hand signs for communication. Saint Benedict recommends silence not because conversation is sinful in itself, but because it is often superficial. Notice that… Read More ›
The “cell” of our personal relationship with God
Monastic life is often described as consisting in the renunciation of the world. Properly understood, the statement may stand, but its starkness may lead to misconceptions. The caricature of the monk as a world-hater, unfortunately supported by evidence from monastic literature itself, misses the point. The separation from ordinary society effected by withdrawal to the… Read More ›
Always joyful
When we die, we are reduced to our real selves. We die into who we really are. In Heaven, we have the expanded intelligence of instant recognition such that we do not speak with the lips nor even necessitate a name. Our “masks” are no longer. We lose the facade we wore to work. We… Read More ›
Noisy world is enemy of prayer
Vatican City, Mar 7, 2012 / 11:15 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The constant noise that accompanies modern life is an enemy of God’s word being heard in prayer, Pope Benedict XVI said. “Interior and exterior silence are necessary in order to hear that Word,” and yet, “our age does not, in fact, favor reflection and contemplation,”… Read More ›
Way of being
Cycles can be broken by simply stopping; sitting, reflecting and enduring what must be faced. Prayer for me can be many things. Yet to sit in silence before Ultimate Reality, simply waiting, not running will eventually bring a feeling of coming home, though it is a process that must be gone through many times, with… Read More ›
Silence and Removing Barriers
The silence of the tongue and of the imagination dissolves the barrier between ourselves and the peace of things that exist only for God and not for themselves. But the silence of all inordinate desire dissolves the barrier between ourselves and God. Then we come to live in Him alone. Thomas Merton No Man is… Read More ›