Third Sunday of Advent

Waiting in Silence,
Waiting in Hope



"Celebration of Evensong"
Gaudate Sunday


Reflection
Sr. Hildegard Pleva, OSsR

Readings: Isaiah 61:1-2, 10-11

John 1:6-8, 19-28


Drivers who frequently navigate previously uncharted territory know well the experience of entering a complex traffic junction, seeing a myriad of route signs and directives and having a moment of indecision and sheer panic; then, in the face of information overload, making a decisive move based on gut intuition alone. The decision is entirely our own. We just tune out everything else, amazingly compute the evidence, and act.

The readings at Mass today told us of John the Baptist. The words of Isaiah anointed him to be proclaimer of the Good News of salvation. And the Gospel of John gives us the words of his proclamation, “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’…There is one among you who you do not recognize.” The Baptizer acts like a GPS, a‘global positioning system’ helping us through a confusing intersection. And he begs his followers to listen up.

How can we listen up? How can we listen up in our current “confusing intersection?” This intersection is overloaded with anxiety about war, global warming, finances, and most touchingly, our ability and our desire to care for one another. Our media-filled, digitally dominated, television addicted age makes listening up as difficult as spotting the right sign at a confusing traffic circle. To assume the posture of listening requires the cultivation of silence. That is a lot to ask at any time but particularly so now – the most frantic days of our consumer-driven culture.

John’s directive today, his plea to pay attention and prepare, and the invitation of all the liturgies of the Advent season call us to enter the silence; a silence reminiscent of Robert Frost’s snowy woods – “lovely, dark and deep.” Here we are invited to sink into the darkness to dwell in the presence of mystery. These days call us to ‘listen up’ – to withdraw, at least for a few moments, from the crowded market place and the frenetic super highway. This season, like no other, begs for recollection and silence in the presence of the mystery of the Incarnation. Only then will the true light penetrate our darkness. How else can we hear and respond to the words of John the Baptist, “Behold the Lamb of God.”

The Lenten Invitation

THE LENTEN CALL

An Invitation


to Accompany Jesus


Is Not Just for Contemplative Nuns

In Catholic culture Lent, it seems to me, has become less concerned with penitential practices and caveats and more a state of mind and heart. I am thinking of the old days (here I really date myself) when conversation in the gang of girls on my block at this time of year was concerned with who would get their ashes first and what you were going to give up for Lent. Would it be T.V. or candy, or maybe reading movie magazines.? Or would you be getting to Mass each day and Stations each week?

For sure this is an ancient girlhood memory. I am filled with gratitude that over the years the deeper spiritual call, the personal call of Jesus, for my companionship along the way to the Cross was expanded upon, drawn out and drawn into my soul.

In the monastery, where Jesus is always the focus, the emphasis at this time is placed on greater exclusivity and depth of relationship via compassionate lingering with the suffering Jesus; the Jesus who suffered in Jerusalem; the Jesus who suffers today in HIV-AIDS ridden Africa, in wartorn Iraq, in shanty towns all over the world and among the illegals and the homeless in our own country.

The lingering I am thinking of here calls to mind the last hours I spent with my dying friend only a few months ago. I just sat at her bedside as she went in and out of sleep. I held her hand and stroked her arm and smiled when she opened her eyes. It was the expression of love through silent presence. Just be with; just hold the hand; just observe, remember and appreciate; just be grateful; just love.

Here is a call for all of us. Be present to Jesus in all of the Psachal Mystery - in His life, death and resurrection. And be present to and conscious of all the people around us and the world in which we live. Jesus is in them all and in the midst of it all. Linger with Him.

The Fruits of Silence

The Advent Call
to Recollection
and Silence

- Not Just for
Centemplative Nuns

A story from the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the 3rd century:

In Scetis, a brother went to see Abba Moses and begged him for a word. And the old man said, “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

Abba Moses directed the contemplative aspirant to an environment conducive to growth. “Growth” can make us think of gardens. Gardens take various forms: fields, raised beds, small urban patches, greenhouses or hydroponic labs. Whatever their form, soil additives are required to promote growth – some sort of “Miracle-Gro”.

Contemplative life can be “grown” in a monastic cell, in any kind of home, in a hermitage, in a service oriented mission, or on a mountain top in Greece. But in all cases a good dose of spiritual “Miracle-Gro” is required. Silence is the necessary additive.

Across the wide spectrum of religious experience, throughout the ages and in our time there is evidence of a universal call to withdrawal – some sort of remove to silence and solitude. I believe that this is the truth of human response to the transcendent to which Philip Groning points in his film "Into Great Silence.” The film is not really about the Carthusians per se, but about that universal religious impulse, to which the Carthusians, among others, give example.

Native Americans on the ‘vision quest’, Muslim Sufi mystics, Buddhist monks, Jewish Kabbalists, Hindu sannyasis, Orthodox Jews observing the Sabbath, as well as Christian nuns and monks all express this impulse by going apart.

Before proceeding, I must ‘fess up' with a bit of truth in advertising. I am not a Carthusian. I am solemnly professed in the contemplative Order of the Most Holy Redeemer, living in monastic papal enclosure. But don’t let the habit and the gray hair fool you. I am no spiritual sage with decades of cloistered life under my veil. I am a newbie, a once married mother of three sons and now a grandmother. My grasp of the silence and recollection is so tenuous as to be closer to the experience of any lay person on the spiritual journey than it is to that of the golden jubilarians in my community. By the late 1990s, seeking refuge from a house filled with young men and their large circle of friends, I had created a little kingdom in my bedroom. It was well appointed with a raft of electronic devices and my feet would hardly have hit the floor in the morning when one if not two or three of them would be turned on. I flooded my senses with input and could multi-task with the best of them. Things began to change slowly as I anticipated my entrance into the monastery in the year 2000. In the years since, my extroverted self as eased into what I find to be the pregnant atmosphere of silence and solitude.

The charism of our Order stresses the capacity of interdependent community life within the context of prayer and by the work of the Holy Spirit, to transform us into the image and likeness of God. We pursue what monastics refer to as conversatio morem, or conversion of manners, so as to become, in the words of our charism, ‘living memories’ of Jesus Christ. How is that for a tall order?

While we do not live the Carthusian heremitic life in community, we observe the Grand Silence from 9pm to 7am, what we call the Little Silence from 1:30 to 3:30pm each day and work very hard at creating an atmosphere of quiet recollection throughout the day. When we moved from a large old monastery into a new one just one third its size, we worried about maintaining the atmosphere of silence. We learned that it is not the size or nature of the surroundings that creates an ambiance of quiet and peace. Rather, it is the degree of desire in those who live there that makes the difference.

As a means of providing an answer to the WHY question about our life and that of the Carthusians, here is the pertinent section from our Rule:

Silence, being an essential value of monastic life, liberates the soul, and always brings with it a call of the desert to solitude and peace. It opens a person to the depths of the mystery of God and to intimacy with Him. It is not in the first place isolation or an absence of words but a loving presence to God as well as a delicate sensitivity to the presence of others by an attitude which allows them to be recollected and to pray. That is why we must love silence for ourselves and must strive to encourage it around us.

Our brothers and sisters …must be able to find in our monasteries the house of prayer and peace they need. ..The enclosure which cuts us off from the world is an open door for those seeking God. Our silence is a word of salvation and our contemplation is missionary activity.

The hidden life and the silence permit us to hear the divine Wisdom which teaches in solitude and in the secret of the heart. Without this, it is difficult to progress in virtue; to accept and to make fruitful the gifts and graces of the Lord.

The liturgies of Advent season call us to enter the silence; a silence reminiscent of Robert Frost’s snowy woods – “lovely, dark and deep,” Here we are invited to dwell in the presence of mystery. These days call us to ‘listen up’ – to withdraw, at least for a few moments, from the crowded market place. This season, like no other, begs for recollection and silence in the presence of the mystery of the Incarnation.

Once, a Jewish friend brought me up short with his insight. He told me with great respect, “If I believed that Christmas was the day on which the most high God came to earth to live among us, I would have to spend that day in the silence of a monastery.”

However, our resistances are so great; our preoccupations and distractions so alluring and only growing in number as I speak, that we respond:

· How could I just do nothing? I would feel so guilty.
· I am not worthy to aspire to the contemplative life of the saints.
· Oh, it is so selfish.
· I have no place and no time for such a thing.

Whatever our objections, in consideration of the possible fruits of even small remnants of time given to silent solitude, we must ask the question, “Can we, in this day and in these times, afford not to enter into that fearsome silence?”

What are the fruits that can be cultivated in the garden of silence?

1. There no doubt as to the development of greater conscious awareness of all reality – a contemplative seeing of colors, textures, patterns, movement and the sheer wonder of it all.

2. Silent solitude, being alone with the alone, fertilizes the soil in which humility grows – the sense of powerlessness and fragility, our dependence on a higher power, our gratitude for what has come not of our own doing but as gratuitous gift.

3. The state of conscious attention and availability to God opens us up to hear God’s word, to allow God’s action to work out our spiritual life. It readies us for the state of infused contemplation which is the work of God alone.

4. In psychological terms, this type of spiritual practice creates an axis of communication between the ego and the true self. In our lives we encounter limits, failures, wrongs, sins of omission and commission in our parents, in our families, in the world and in ourselves. In response we develop false aspects of ourselves, in the effort to protect our truest essence and enable us to live safely with others. Unfortunately, although we mature and circumstances change we usually do not drop the protective gear of the false self. Often we become weighted down and bound up in a false way of being though it has become very unsatisfying or even dysfunctional. Solitude and communion allow the inner work necessary for shedding the false self, for greater personal integration and living out of our truest selves with more freedom.

5. These new perspectives, the freedoms they cultivate, slowly and and gently seep out of our times of silent withdrawal and begin to water the garden that is the rest of our time lived in community, in family, the workplace, the monastery and personal relationships. “Solitude, like a compassionate surgeon, cuts away our defenses” revealing our hidden agendas. In our new consciousness, humility and perspective, the agendas become less and less compelling and we find ourselves surrendering to divine compassion.

6. For monastics, recollection, silence and solitude create the ambiance necessary for the apostolic work of prayer. Everything in the monastery is focused on living and preserving the communal and private prayer that is the core of the life. Our life does not really make any sense unless one believes in the power of prayer.

Today our understanding of the mystery and economy of prayer are being expanded in two ways. The first is attested to by the number of titles in the local book store concerning contemplative prayer, the mystical aspects of contemplation. Karl Rahner said, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or not at all.” The word mystic has, if you will, lost some of its mystique. We have come to appreciate in a healthy way that we are all mystics. The mystic heart is the deepest part of who we are. In silence and solitude we cultivate the ground of mystical prayer.

The second expansion of our understanding is coming out of the realm of quantum physics. As someone who failed high school chemistry and was thus deprived of senior physics I cannot do this subject justice. But the theologian, Barbara Fiand and others, speak today of prayer as transtemporal and transpacial. They tell us that all of creation is totally interconnected in a field of energy. Such talk provided new understanding of Karl Jung’s theory of collective consciousness. We are also being told that our very thoughts have energy which reverberates through the network backwards and forwards. Modern scientific discussion is giving new meaning to the work of solitary contemplation and prayer. Thomas Merton expressed this more poetically: "In the night of our technological barbarism, monks must be a tress which exist silently in the dark, and by their vital presence purify the air."

7. Finally, silence cultivates the prophetic voice. If the word prophet is too loaded, how about this? By our spiritual practice of silence and solitude we offer a counter-cultural statement concerning the nature of life, our work in the world, our human frailty and our dependence upon God. In seeking some distance we arrive at the margins and are rewarded for our effort by a broader view and different perspective. We return to community, family, workplace, monastery, holiday traffic, the line at the supermarket, the front page of the New York Times or the revelations of CNN. In all these places we encounter reality and act within that reality from a new perspective. It is the communal aspect of the examined life that keeps us honest. It is the place where the rubber must hit the road lest our spiritual practice be reduced to so much contemplative navel gazing.

Rather than a place of confinement, the figurative cell is the homestead of the liberated self, the place in which the true self is set free to live as a child of God. We never enter the cell alone. Believing this we can confidently surrender to the invitation which is the first line of St. Romuald’s brief rule for hermits: “Sit in your cell as in paradise.”

Recollection and Silence

Our recollection as Redmptoristines is our 'life, hidden with Christ in God.'

It unties us with Christ in spirit and in heart enabling us to live the Paschal

Mystery...

Silence, being an essential value of monastic life, liberates the soul, and always

brings with it the call of the desert to solitude and peace.

It opens a person to the depths of the mystery of God and to

intimacy with Him.

Redemptoristine Rule - 6.45,46

The other day I enjoyed a quiet blissful almost entire morning of silence. I went early to our large sewing room furnished with many sewing machines, cutting tables, and racks for hanging completed capes for the Knights and Ladies of the Holy Sepulchre or habits for Redemptorist priests and brothers. It is a bright room with large windows that allow for a view of the river valley, the vagaries of the weather or the deer and Canadian geese that wander by. Some times this room is very noisy, humming with the sound of a few workhorses of the sewing business vying with each other for mastery and maybe the click clack of a typewriter (yes, we still have one). Most days I share the room with another sister or two or three and so there may be conversation about the work we are doing or a brief exchange about community business or a personal concern. But most of the time conversation is minimal as we try, within humane limits, to maintain those primary values of contemplative monastic life - silence and recollection.

It seems that this business about maintaining silence remains part of the 'mystique' with which lay people regard our life. I am currently reading a delightful pictorial history of the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky, the community to which Thomas Merton belonged. The author speaks of this fascination and how newspaper readers delighted over one hundred years ago to read of a visit of outsiders into the enclosure (the governor and his wife, no less) and the nature of the spoken words issuing forth from the long silent lips of the monks. It also seems that extended periods of silence are looked upon as a particularly difficult penance. But the other morning, when I started my sewing early, when the sunlight was streaming through the windows and no one came to disturb me, that morning was glorious.

This reaction would not have been the case just a few years ago. Over the years of raising three sons in a small house, as their bodies and circles of friends expanded, I found myself gravitating more and more to my bedroom. It was a place to go when I had enough of the activity and all of us needed our own space. Gradually the room became a technology center too. There was the telephone, of course, T.V., VCR, radio/tape/cd player, eventually a computer and, but of course, my sewing machine. My feet did not hit the floor in the morning without one, maybe two, of those devices being turned on beginning the endless stream of input with which I kept daily rhythm. And it just went on from there. This must all sound very familiar. It was part of my facility with multi-tasking, at which success is a boon to motherhood combined with the world of work.

I would not have entered the monastery in the year 2000 if I had not already begun to cultivate the ability to turn it all off. I began a few years before by avoiding all information technology in the morning. Even the twenty-minute drive to school became meditation time. But the commitment to contemplative life upped the ante. Shortly after I entered I was posted to the sewing room. I arrived one morning with cassette tape player on my hip and headset in place. Later, I was privately encourage by my formator (read as novice mistress), that I should not come to work so armed. Rather the goal was to allow the silence to do its work, to bring me to a place, some moments, of recollection. Now that may have an arcane ring to it. What exactly is recollection? It is a posture, a way of being, that speaks of openness, of availability to God, to His grace and to the inspiration of the Spirit. It is a contemplative stance in a hectic, distracting world.

Prayer is not a one way street. Seems to me the old catechism said (the new one too) that prayer is a conversation with God in which both talking and listening takes place. Recollection is that contemplative way of being which allows for the listening part.

During that special morning I was putting very exacting finishing touches on a habit destined for a Redemptorist priest I know. Years ago, the same sister who advised mental silence in the sewing room, shared that she enjoyed this work for the Redemptorists. It was a contribution to their varied ministries, a support for them in addition to our prayers. She even suggested when a habit proved to be a difficult one, calling for much ripping and adjusting, "He must really need your prayers and effort." So that morning I prayed for the priest who would receive that habit and felt privileged to be able to provide, at least in part, this sign of his commitment to Jesus our Redeemer and to serving the poor and most abandoned.

The problems of our world call out to us for a more conscious awareness of ourselves, our lives, the choices we make and our relationship with all other people, all other creatures and the environment which sustains us. I have found that I cannot live more consciously, cannot hear God speaking directly His words of love for me and for the world, unless I purposefully cultivate opportunities to enter into silence and recollection, prerequisites to contemplative prayer. I eagerly await another quiet morning in the sewing room.

Visualizing the Heart of Contemplative Monastic Life

Philip Groning's Film

Into Great Silence

Feast for the Eyes

and

Balm for the Soul

An experience can be 'made' in the waiting or destroyed by inflated anticipation. In speaking of the film Into Great Silence, the period of long expectation, hearing the reactions of others and reading reviews did nothing to lessen enjoyment of the experience and the impact of its images. I am not qualified to comment on the technical achievements of the film nor do I wish to spoil the experience of seeing it by offering too many specifics concerning details and images that remain with me so powerfully. However, I do want to share my reaction and give my hearty recommendation.

Our community of contemplative nuns does not, in any way, live the austere style of hermit life within community for which the Carthusians are known. Theirs is a most ascetic life, which is lived within the monastic collective, but with each day spent almost exclusively within the confines of one's cell (a small 'apartment' of rooms with a garden) devoted to prayer, meditation, work, study and rest. The monastery of the Grande Chartreuse is a huge medieval appearing complex perched on a mountainside in eastern France. Because we interpret and live our rules of enclosure in a different manner, five of us were able to go to a local cinema to see the film on the big screen. This is not typical for us at all. We approached this film as a source of spiritual enrichment, as a mediation on the values that lie at the heart of the life embraced by Christian contemplative monks and nuns all over world and their counterparts in every major religious tradition.

That is exactly what the gifted and patient Philip Groning provided for those who see his film. It was an experience, I believe, very much enhanced by viewing it on a large screen which paid fitting homage to spectacular panoramas of mountains and sky. Sitting in the dark silence of the theater provided the ambiance of setting and tone conducive to entering into such a contemplative meditation. It is testimony to the magnetism of the film that its extreme length, a necessary feature communicating the call to perseverance for a lifetime, is quickly forgotten as one is completely drawn into the pace, the visuals and the portent of the documentary. And, oddly enough in our age of extreme bombardment by sound of every kind, the silence is soon appreciated as gift - less interference with the message.

The message at hand is the mystery that lies at the heart of such a life - total, utter, exclusive surrender to the presence of God. If this film were one's only source of solid information about the Carthusian way of life, the viewer would remain quite ignorant. The film does not indicate how many times a day they pray together or alone; how the house is run; how assignments are made; who can come and who can go; whether or not they attend Mass every day; how they elect their abbot. Although the film visually carries the viewer from one winter through the year to the next winter, it gives no account of the events of the Liturgical Year. The only rituals observed are the Communion part of a Mass and a procession with adoration of the Blessed Sacrament for the Feast of Corpus Christi. It may be that Groning saw these as merely externals which do not speak of the nature of the contemplative imperative within the individual. It was this matter of the heart, this mystery that his images communicated. In this he succeeds totally. Visualized in image, repetition, composition, occasional sound and brief interspersed quotes from scripture and spiritual works is the heart of the matter - utter devotion to a life of being present to God, simplicity in all things, and surrender to God's will in loving charity. How one 'does' this is not the point. The Carthusians do it this way. We Redemptoristines do it another way. The Carmelites and the Trappists in still other ways, each to their own charismatic insight, emphasizing solitude here, or silence there, or, for some, community life as the locus for individual transformation. But, in the heart, lie the same values, the same interior movement, the same desire for God, the same effort, although differently expressed, to become 'walled about by God.'

I found the movie to be a visual feast for the eyes; sometimes one Renaissance or Dutch master's rendering of a scene after the other; sometimes an elongated impressionist image moving and changing shape before the eyes; a newly washed tin plate leaning against a stone wall dripping rinse water one slow drop at a time or the play of raindrops on the surface of a pool of water creating a multitude of endless and unique rippled patterns.

Enough words! After all, there a few words in the film. I will close with one of the quotations periodically appearing across the screen in the film.

You shall seek me and because you seek me with all your heart, I will let myself be found.