Silence Prepares Us

(Today's first reading at mass)

PASS IT ON #64

Silence Prepares Us for the Coming of Christ

by Catherine Doherty

When peaceful silence lay over all,
And night had run the half of her swift course,
Down from the heavens, from the royal throne, leapt your all-powerful Word;
Into the heart of a doomed land.
(Wisdom 18: 14-15)

It is not easy to be silent, but it is necessary if we are to begin our journey inward to meet the God who dwells within us. Jesus Christ said, “My Father and I and the Holy Spirit will come and dwell within you.”

Silence can also become a cradle. Silence is the cradle of the Incarnation of God, for there was a great and awesome silence when God was born.

I make a cradle out of my heart for any one of you to rest in like a child. As Christ said, “Unless you become like little children you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” That’s why my favorite prayer is: “Lord, give me the heart of a child and the awesome courage to live it out as an adult.”

Silence is also an inn. There was a Good Samaritan who picked up the man besieged by robbers. Who of us is not besieged by robbers today? Who of us does not need an inn where all is rest and peace and silence? This is what silence does; it becomes the highest communication, the quickest way to peace, the cradle for a child, an inn for the weary and tired.

Silence produces all this if you and I fall in love with God. For it is out of that love, that fantastic union that only God could devise for us, that silence can become all those things.

What does the world need most of all? It needs to touch God. Through silence I realize that I can touch Jesus Christ everywhere. Silence is the key to many secrets of God. Why don’t we ask him to give it to us?

Lovers, married people, close friends—all will say that there are moments in their lives when words fall away as if they were old rags—they’ve become useless. Love cannot deal with them. Love can only deal with silence. It’s a silence pregnant with God, filled with love. Wherever there is loving communicative silence, there is God.

It is God who bids us enter into communication. The Father spoke the Word. The Word became incarnate, became a man, our Lord Jesus Christ, who walked among us. He is present among us now; Christ is in our midst. He is this Word that is really the essence of communication.

We go to Mass and receive Holy Communion—we communicate with God. He enters into us and he becomes part of us. This is done so silently. We receive a piece of bread: God. There is silence between two lovers—God and man. The mystery of God meets the mystery of man. This is where real communication begins, when I am in communion with God, with the Most Holy Trinity.

There is un-peace in our hearts, and in the world. Why is there violence everywhere? Because we are not silent. We have not lifted our hearts to God. We have not communicated with him. We have not taken inner counsel with one another. That is to say, that counsel that comes from the union of love.

How many of us are silent enough to listen to the other? When one is listening and another talking, people begin to understand each other; and then this can be reversed and the one listening can begin to talk. We don’t listen because we have no inner silence of mind or soul.

The Word, Jesus Christ, comes when peaceful silence encompasses everything, when the night is half spent. I may refuse to enter into the night of inner quiet, of non-resistance to the divine. If I do refuse, my life is doomed to remain parched and lifeless.

What is this silence that constantly prepares for the coming of the Lord? Silence can be understood in many ways. Silence can be experienced as the absence of noise. Silence may also mean the absence of words that are needless. The absence of useless talk, the softening of a voice that is shrill and strident. The cultivation of silence belongs to the gentle style of life. A style permeated with what we are and what we do. Love can make us capable of silence.

Today people are hungry for friendship, for understanding, for someone to talk to, someone who really listens. But who of us ordinary mortals can really listen with the ear of the heart wide open, taking in every word that the other says? The weight of listening is heavy. That is why we need to pray for a “spiritual bulldozer” to make straight the ways of the Lord in our hearts, so that he might come unencumbered and do the listening in our hearts. So that he might understand, console, help those who come to us!

He will do it through us if we reduce our interior noise to a gentle silence that listens to him. He will do it if we stop the swirling dust of our mutterings, our non-listening to our brother. He will come especially when we allow this spiritual bulldozer to really make straight the paths of our hearts for him to walk on unencumbered, so that he can listen through us, talk through us, understand through us.

Sometimes we speak anxious and tense words interiorly to ourselves, words that drive us toward moralistic self-perfection. These powerful, unspoken words can be more harmful than spoken ones, for they halt the one Word that wants to fill my life.

To reduce our noise, to become silent, is to enter his silence, and his silence speaks. There is no renowned spiritual master, from the East or the West, who did not praise the silence that leaves room for presence to the Presence: God himself.

— From Molchanie

Prayer and Solitude

Today is the feast day of St Bruno, founder of the Carthusians.

The Carthusian Order

 

The Order was founded by Saint Bruno in 1084 and comprises a masculine and a feminine branch.At present, the Order is composed of about 450 monks and nuns who live a solitary life at the heart of the Church; there are 24 Houses in three continents, all dedicated exclusively to the contemplative life.

Contemplative monks and nuns

The Carthusians consecrate their lives entirely to prayer and seeking God in the secret of their hearts. They intercede for the Church and for the salvation of the whole world. Their life finds its balance around three axes:silence, solitude, living in cell;prayer in common in the church, three times a day, as well as some fraternal meetings;their own liturgy, adapted to their style of life and the small number of religious.

Solitary life

“Our principal endeavour and goal is to devote ourselves to the silence and solitude of cell…There is the faithful soul frequently united with the Word of God; there is the bride made one with her spouse; there is earth joined to heaven, the divine to the human.”Statutes 4.1

 

All live a very solitary life of prayer and work, in cell for some, while others are more dedicated to the daily tasks of the monastery.

Carthusian solitude is not total, but is balanced by a share of community life, in particular by the conventual Eucharist, the long night vigils and Vespers.

Song from Silence

Leader: The song from the silence (CHURCH TIMES)

TODAY is the festival of the Visitation — or the Visit, as the Common Worship calendar now puts it — of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth. It is easily and often neglected. Nevertheless, it should have a special place in Christians’ hearts as marking the occasion in scripture when the Lord’s mother has the most to say for herself; for it is, above all, the festival of the Magnificat — of our Lady baring her soul. The scriptural record of her words is scant. Nevertheless, even her briefest sayings — “Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” “Be it unto me according to thy word,” “Whatever he saith unto you, do it” — have stimulated many hours of thought and devotion. It is not surprising that Christians find inexhaustible riches, then, in the ten verses of her Magnificat.
Filled with the Spirit, Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth, the mother of St John the Baptist, greets her in the words that have become the second sentence of the Hail Mary. Mary responds with a song drawn from scripture: “My soul doth magnify the Lord. . .” She foresees the future generations who will count her blessed in her Son. She sings of the mercy and strength of God; of his kindness to the poor and the humble and the meek; of his justice. She sets the birth of the Lord in its context as the fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham in the Hebrew scriptures.
A generation ago, the Magnificat was one of the scriptural passages most familiar to Anglicans: the first of the Gospel canticles at evensong, which was still one of the services most popular among churchgoers. Despite the benefits of the Parish Communion and liturgical revision, the downside is the loss of these canticles and psalms from the list of mental church furnishings that weekly churchgoers all but effortlessly acquire. Timothy Dudley-Smith’s “Tell out my soul” is an excellent hymn, and widely known, but it is a loose paraphrase, not a substitute for scripture itself.

Mary bares her soul and her heart. It is no accident that her song of praise emerges from her silent pondering. Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, in the extract from her new book writes of harvesting “hermit moments” of silent presence and listening. While it may be possible (as she suggests in her book) to find these at home or in a supermarket queue, it is also true that for many this is too much to expect. They need their times of prayer in church. Today, however, as much of an endangered species as the singing of evensong is the opportunity to arrive in a church, say, 15 minutes before the service, and enjoy uninterrupted silent prayer. In many churches, talk has taken over. May every parish priest and cathedral dean resolve to make the stilling of this sea of chatter a priority over the coming year. “Holy is his name.”

Into Great Silence

Now here's a film I want to see.

Into Great Silence

"Although I had only read a few reviews of this film, I knew I just had to see it to satisfy my curiosity of how it would depict the monastic life. As with The Passion of the Christ, Into Great Silence sounded like a film worth supporting, even if it meant driving a distance to see it. It is rare to view an authentic Catholic film at a secular movie theater.This film was well-worth the trip.

Into Great Silence is a deeply spiritual film that will touch the innermost depths of your soul if you permit it to do so. It is a lengthy (162 minutes), but hypnotic and spiritually stimulating story of the Carthusian monks whose monastery is located in the French Alps.

In 1984, German film-maker Phillip Groning approached the Carthusians about making a film inside the monastery walls of the Grand Chartreuse, but was turned down. Sixteen years later, the Prior gave him permission to do so. While shooting this film, Groning lived in the monastery for six months, following the monks around with his camera. While he lived there, he slept in a small cell, performing daily chores, in addition to shooting the film entirely by himself.

The title of the film refers to the silence that many contemplative orders practice in order to focus on God and to concentrate on the tasks at hand - living in the present moment, offering up their work as prayer and penance for the atonement of sins; offering up their lives as a gift to God.

The Carthusian Order was founded in 1084 by St. Bruno of Cologne. The Carthusians lead an essentially solitary and contemplative life, and, although they do not take a vow of silence, they are encouraged to speak only when absolutely necessary. However, this nearly dialogue-free movie is hardly silent, but speaks volumes to the soul.The film opens with a picturesque, serene winter scene of the monastery against the backdrop of the towering Alps covered with snow. Snowflakes whirl in wild, but silent activity. Inside the monastery, one of the monks is praying intently in the privacy and silence of his cell. From there, we see glimpses of other monks performing the duties of their daily life, which are structured around the Liturgy of the Hours. (Each day they adore God by praying seven times, getting up during the night to recite community prayers.) In addition to community prayer, much time is devoted to mental prayer. The rest is divided between manual labor, study, and a little recreation.Some of the activities we see the monks performing include: cutting material for new habits, chopping firewood, cooking, gardening, shoveling snow, and delivering hot meals to the monks in their cells. Every work they perform is carried out carefully, conscientiously, and silently, with love. Watching each ritual, task, and prayer that is performed, the viewer feels a sense of admiration for these holy men who exercise self-discipline and demonstrate their deep love for God by carrying out these "demanding" duties so faithfully. Abandonment to Divine Providence - total self-surrender to God - is a recurring theme throughout this film.We also see how this love for God translates into loving one another. In one scene, a younger monk is shown rubbing a salve onto the skin of an older monk's arms and shoulders. In another scene, we watch the older monk carefully shaving the younger monk's head.Groning also shows us the humorous and human side of the monks through a scene in which an older monk is playing with the cats as he feeds them and in another scene where the monks are playfully sliding down a slick, icy hill. Like innocent children, they enjoy the simple things in life.The beauty of this film is depicted by the naturalness of the light in the scenes. During night prayer, the monks meet in the dark chapel, which is illuminated only by the glow of the red sanctuary light. Resembling the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the red light flickers and appears to grow larger, as they lift their voices in praise to their Creator. During the outdoor scenes and the changing of the seasons, the natural lighting is so beautiful, it is almost like studying paintings by Monet.The flow of time comes through in the camera shots of a star -filled sky, the thin, wispy white clouds which seem to dance in harmony with the monks' chants, and the changing of the seasons from winter's melting snow and icicles to a blooming spring to the lush vegetation of summer.An intimate view of the monks is shown when each face is revealed in close-up view. What I saw in each face was honesty, and a deep sense of inner joy and peace.Throughout the film, scripture passages from both the Old and New Testament are interspersed, adding meaning and purpose to the actions of the monks. Some of these include: "Oh, Lord, You have seduced me and I was seduced." "Anyone who does not give up all he has cannot be my disciple." Self-denial as well as the joy of self-surrender are depicted in the lives of these monks. This is the path to true freedom and the way to true happiness for all eternity.

I highly recommend this film. I predict that it will be a spiritual classic and be loved by audiences for many years to come."

Jean Heimann