Silent Prayer Retreat
I just returned from a 3-day silent prayer retreat. My wife was wonderful to let me go (we have a big family). This is my second such retreat. It isn’t easy to describe. The venue is a Trappist monastery. This group of contemplative monks live a rather simple life composed of communal and private prayer, sacred reading, study, manual labor, service to the brethren, and hospitality. Interspersed throughout each day/night, they gather seven times to pray, read Scripture, chant/pray the Psalms, and worship God. It is all open to the retreatants and the public (including the daily church service). The monks use the ancient practice (going all the way back to biblical times) of chanting the Psalms. The chapel is silent and still and God is palpable for those who see with loving attention. When singing and speaking does occur, everything is slow, with a very measured pace. A monk friend of mine said to pay attention to even the silence between the words. Their days are filled with a sacred rhythm and one is incredibly blessed to join in the quiet ecstasy.
We should all sit down, take a deep breath, pray, and spend time in the silence and stillness at the heart of the world. Kathleen Norris states that we need to recognize the poverty of our affluence in the face of God’s overflowing generosity and accept that so much of what we take for granted, even the ordinary rhythm of day and night, has something to say to us. It speaks in silence, not noise.
“...the greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice.”
~Romano Guardini
“Silence is not merely the absence of noise but the spirit of loving attention.”
~Laurence Freeman (re-posted)
“Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us.
It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the outgrowth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine.
All we ought to do is to let the insight be and to listen to the soul’s recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God’s eternal speech.”
~Abraham Heschel
We should all sit down, take a deep breath, pray, and spend time in the silence and stillness at the heart of the world. Kathleen Norris states that we need to recognize the poverty of our affluence in the face of God’s overflowing generosity and accept that so much of what we take for granted, even the ordinary rhythm of day and night, has something to say to us. It speaks in silence, not noise.
“...the greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice.”
~Romano Guardini
“Silence is not merely the absence of noise but the spirit of loving attention.”
~Laurence Freeman (re-posted)
“Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us.
It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the outgrowth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine.
All we ought to do is to let the insight be and to listen to the soul’s recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God’s eternal speech.”
~Abraham Heschel
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