Silence

I have created this blog as a response to watching the film, Into Great Silence. My desire to live a contemplative life cannot be realised in the world I inhabit, so I have decided to do the next best thing, and create a Carthusian corner of my own on the internet. If you have found your way here, I pray that the peace, silence and lack of busy-ness and clutter I hope to convey, will enable you to find peace too…

Abba Moses, one of the great Desert Fathers, said to his monks: “Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”  and really, this is a mandate to seek out our inner silence and not to run away from it…I don’t have a cell, as the Carthusians do, and I wonder if I could cope with such strict isolation…as the Carthusian website says:

“The monks talk to each other twice a week.” and ”Carthusians are hermits who live within a community. They seek God in solitude……The life of solitude with God is pretty much as it was 4000 years ago as it is now, and as it will be in 4000 years time. This is because you do not need anything for it – except life.”

These monks do not run away from isolation and loneliness, but live grounded within it, and I sometimes wonder if we would benefit from taking a little of that on board in our own lives. We each carry a cell within us, the dwelling place of God, where He lives quite outside the world and its distractions. We can each make a cell in our homes ~ a place to go and meet with God just as we are, without masks and free of the trappings of our lives. Naked, vulnerable…is there any other way we can really meet with God? I am coming to believe that it is only at our most needy, vulnerable and useless that we can truly know God for who He is. Everything else gets in the way.

On St. Hugh’s Charterhouse website it says:

“At the centre of Carthusian life is the hermitage. The community life brings together a group of hermits. It is in solitude that the heart is deepened and inhabited. The hermitage is a place above all of communion with God and, paradoxically, with man. The monk is “never less alone than when alone.” Little by little his heart will be is enlarged to the dimensions of Christ’s love encompassing everything and every person in heaven and on earth. His cell, as it were, has “glass walls”. Apart from all, to all we are united.

“Our principal endeavour and goal is to devote ourselves to the silence and solitude of cell. This is holy ground, a place where, as a man with his friend, the Lord and his servant often speak together; 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. The journey, however, is long, and the way dry and barren, that must be travelled to attain the fount of water, the land of promise.”
(Statutes, 4.1)

“The longer the monk lives in cell, the more gladly will he do so, as long as he occupies himself in it usefully and in an orderly manner, reading, writing, reciting psalms, praying, meditating, contemplating and working. Let him make a practice of resorting, from time to time, to a tranquil listening of the heart that allows God to enter through all its doors and passages.” (Statutes, 4.2)

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So there is much to be said of “being alone”, and it is a different thing than merely “loneliness”. Loneliness is a craving for human company, for identification, often for attention. And there is nothing wrong with that, it is in our nature as human beings to desire the company of others. But one can turn “loneliness” into “being alone with God”, and surely, if we can do that, we will not be truly lonely…