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Silence

Lent Study Group

One of my top 10 books of the last 10 years has to be:

'A Book of Silence' by Sara Maitland.

I first heard Sara talk at Greenbelt many years ago and I was fascinated then by who she was - an eccentric woman, speaking with intensity and insight, offering an alternative and captivating viewpoint on the human experience.

In this book she explores silence in all sorts of ways: by living on her own; by visiting the desert; through analysing the desert traditions within early Christianity; and through attending to what happens to the body and the mind in and through extended silence and isolation.

Her book begins:

I am sitting on the front doorstep of my little house with a cup of coffee, looking down the valley at my extraordinary view of nothing. It is wonderful. Virginia Woolf famously taught us that every woman writer needs a room of her own. She didn't know the half of it, in my opinion. I need a moor of my own. Or, as an exasperated but obviously sensitive friend commented when she came to see my latest lunacy, 'Only, you, Sara - twenty-mile views of absoloutely nothing?'

 Later on she writes (p. 221):

 I started to think that perhaps silence is God. Perhaps God is silence - the shinning, spining ring 'of pure and endless light'. Perhaps God speaking is a 'verb', an act, but God in perfect self-communication, in love within the Trinity, is silent and therefore is silence. God is silence, a silence that is positive, alive, actual, and of its 'nature' unbreakable. Perhaps the verb 'God' - speaking, creating- is one more reflex of the infinite generosity, the self-giving abandonment, the kenotic love of God.
Read the extracts above, you may wish to consider:

How do you respond to the idea that God is silence?
How can silence be positive, alive and actual?
How comfortable are you with silence?
Can you spend more time in silent prayer each day?


True Peace

 A brother asked abba Poemen, 'How should I behave in my cell in the place where I am living?' He replied, 'Behave as if you were a stranger, and wherever you are, do not expect your words to have any influence and you will be at peace'.

(Daily readings with the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward)



Spend some time with these 2 passages from scripture:

Luke 6:12 

'Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God'.

Matthew 14:23

'And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came he was there alone.'


A Prayer

Loving Jesus,
You were often alone,
Seeking your Father's will,
Interceding for us:
In the aloneness of our hearts,
Through the long shadow of our fear,
Bring your healing grace
And set us free. Amen 

https://www.theschoolofmeditation.org/




Comments

  1. Tina Nay28 March 2020 at 06:56

    Thank you Silence is hard for me so this enforced distancing from people and not being so active and noisy should teach me a lot I pray

    ReplyDelete

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