“For there is a time to fight and a time to make use of silence. If we truly possess the pedagogy of silence that comes from God, we will have a little of heaven’s patience.”
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), page 154.
“The virtue of silence does not mean that we must never speak. It invites us to remain mute when there are no good reasons to speak up. Ecclesiastes says: ‘There is … a time to keep silence, and a time to speak’ (Eccles 3:7). Referring to these words, Saint Gregory of Nyssa remarks: ‘The time to keep silence is mentioned first, because by silence we learn the art of speaking well.’ When, therefore, should a Christian who desires to become holy be silent, and when should he speak? He should be silent when it is not necessary to speak, and he should speak when necessity or charity requires it. Saint Chrysostom gives the following rule: ‘Speak only when it is more useful to speak than to be silent.’
“Saint Arsenius acknowledges that he often regretted having spoken, but never regretted having kept silence. Saint Ephrem says: ‘Speak much with God but little with men’.”
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), p. 239.
“If you are waiting for someone to come along and feed you the contemplative life with a spoon, you are going to wait a long time, especially in America. You had better renounce your inertia, pray for a little imagination, ask the Lord to awaken your creative freedom, and consider some of the following possibilities:
“1. It is possible that by the sacrifice of seemingly good economic opportunities, you could move into the country or to a small town where you would have more time to think. This would involve the acceptance of a relative poverty perhaps. ….
“2. Wherever you may be, it is always possible to give yourself the benefit of those parts of the day which are quiet because the world does not value them. One of these is the small hours of the morning. [getting up “around four or five in the morning”]….
“3. It should be too obvious to mention that Sunday is set apart by nature and by the tradition of the Church as a day of contemplation. ….
“4. Whenever one seeks the light of contemplation, he commits himself by that very fact to a certain spiritual discipline. … But it would be a mistake for a man or woman with all the obligations and hardships of secular life to live in the world like a cloistered monk. To try to do this would be an illusion. ….
“5. It follows from this that for the married Christian, his married life is essentially bound up with his contemplation. This is inevitable. ….
“In conclusion, then, though it is right that the Christian layman try to keep his life ordered and peaceful, and to some extent recollected, what he needs most of all is a contemplative life centered in the mystery of marriage. The development of such a spirituality is very necessary and much to be desired.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. (NY: HarperOne, 2003), pp. 137-141. [Merton wrote this in 1959]
“You would do wrong to be so hard-hearted as not to be stirred by this murder, or if you acceded to it and did not wholeheartedly condemn it. It would be equally wrong to curse the murderers, desire revenge, or nurse hostility rather than to pray for them.” [the murder victim in this case was their pastor]
Martin Luther. “A Letter of Consolation to the Christians at Halle Upon the Death of their Pastor, George Winkler” (1527) Luther’s Works Vol. 43. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), p. 164.
“It is time to revolt against the dictatorship of noise that seeks to break our hearts and our intellects. A noisy society is like sorry-looking cardboard stage scenery, a world without substance, an immature flight. A noisy Church would become vain, unfaithful, and dangerous.”
Robert Cardinal Sarah with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), p. 240.
“To sum up, in prayer there is the danger of falling into one of two opposite extremes. The first is ‘mythologizing’ (or making into an idol) the external forms, when prayer is reduced to the mechanical following of a rule or a method of praying. The second is the rejection of and allergic reaction toward all forms of prayer and asceticism. Those fall into this sad situation who do not know how to combine the external forms with sincerity of heart.”
Augustine Ichiro Okumura. Awakening to Prayer. Translated by Theresa Kazue Hiraki and Albert Masaru Yamato. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1994), p. 52.
“The solitary easily plunges to a cavern of darkness and of phantoms more horrible and more absurd than the most inane set of conventional social images. The suffering he must then face is neither salutary nor noble. It is catastrophic.”
Thomas Merton. “Notes for a ‘Philosophy of Solitude’.” (1960) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), p. 72.
“The church is the single multi-ethnic family promised by the creator God to Abraham. It was brought into being through Israel’s Messiah. Jesus, energized by God’s Spirit, and it was called to bring the transformative news of God’s rescuing justice to the whole creation. That’s a tight-packed definition, and every bit of it counts.”
Tom Wright. Simply Christian. (London: SPCK, 2006), p. 171.
“Every day we monks live in important spiritual practices, such as stability, attentiveness or mindfulness, meditation, silence, prayer, obedience, purity of heart, simplicity, openness, and many others. But lectio divina is the center of our monastic life. Monastic practices are not simply things to do. They are dimensions of the Spirit. If we cannot live these dimensions, we are not really monks.”
Alessandro Barban. “Lectio Divina and Monastic Theology in Camaldolese Life” in Belisle, Peter-Damian, editor. The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002), p. 59.
“Before long it occurred to me to do what historians are professionally equipped to do. Live with a cluttered mental attic; run a spiritual antique shop; resist the impulse to throw anything away. Hang on after the avant-garde rejects. Save, shuffle, classify, enjoy the relics. Eventually shapes emerge. One learns to live with contradictions and paradoxes, but what is new about that in theology?”
Martin Marty in “Theology Today,” January 1972, p. 472.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 