Heavenly voice from the silence
Heavenly voice from the silence
By: W.E. Gutman
Description: A monk reaches out beyond the cloister walls
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Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
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“My body was fed and sated, my mind overloaded; but my soul was parched and fallow.”
Sacrificing silence in exchange for anonymity and stirred by an ageless passion, a Carthusian monk has agreed to reach out beyond the cloister walls and touch the world. I shall call him Ben Adam, meaning Son of Man.
It’s early morning. Before me, a steep expanse of granite rises against a pewter sky, dwarfing weathered ridges, dense forrest and narrow ravines, dominating the valley below. In this magnificent desolation, crowning a rocky bluff and seemingly untouched by calamity or the passage of time, stands the Monastère de la Grande Chartreuse.
In June 1084, on this stretch of wilderness in southeastern France, Saint Bruno, a canon from Cologne and six followers founded an order, the Carthusians, whose members share, in almost total solitude and virtual silence, a life syncopated by labor and study, marked by self-denial and eased by contemplation and prayer.
The monastery’s lean medieval geometry clings to time, a metaphor to its own immutability. Eight fires, some deliberately set by waves of marauding feudal landlords, self-exile, landslides, persecution and banishment have tested the faith and tenacity of the Carthusian Order. Its spires loom through the barren treetops but no one goes beyond the massive wooden doors. You may approach, but you cannot enter unless you are prepared to make, as Ben Adam did, the most solemn vow of all.
The monastery turns to the world an austere visage. Half-fortress, half-cloister, its stone walls and slate pepperpot towers soar skyward like hands fused in prayer. But what this edifice protects and upholds are silence and solitude — fragile, easily broken — and unwavering faith. Inside, starkness and parsimony reign. Introspection and worship suffer no distraction.
Called an hermitage and consisting of a four-room dwelling, living quarters are Spartan. On the upper floor is an anteroom and the cubiculum where monks spend virtually their entire life. Beds are rustic. There is an oratory, a rough-hewn narrow desk, a bookshelf, a pot-bellied wood burning stove and a dining table set against a window facing the surrounding mountains. The lower level consists of a small vegetable garden, a workshop and a wood shed.
Life at the monastery
Ben Adam is at his desk. I will not see his face but his voice is soft and firm, his laughter filled with grace and warmth. My questions, clumsy or overly solicitous, amuse him. But his answers are well-pondered and cogent, his arguments devoid of sophistry or equivocation.
Ben Adam is infinitely patient. Time is always on the side of those who need not measure it, who crave silence and solitude, who find strength in ascetisism and are energized by self-denial. For them, all time stands still. They have heard the voice, seen the beckoning light and exultantly rushed into God’s arms. Such are the choices and rewards of monasticism.
What draws some of us to such an existence? What ideal takes people away from the din and follies of society into the sepulchral shadows of solitude and silence? What irresistible voice calls men and women to give themselves to the strict routine, social isolation and sexual abstinence of monastic life?
“It is an unmet need for the spiritual love that only prayer can deliver,” Ben Adam murmurs.
To appreciate the eremitic life, it is helpful to see those who answer its call as they see themselves — men and women who seek and find God. Their destiny, their stated mission: to help bring world peace through the power of prayer.
“There is too much emphasis on doing and producing, not enough on the truth of being, on the need to be,” says Ben Adam. “Undernourished and abused by the torments of modern life, the soul shrivels and dies.”
To be human is to host the seeds of contradiction and ambiguity, to entertain paradox, to stroke the flames of incongruity. Most of us favor rich food and warmth, seek the company of our peers, raise families, feel happier when the sun is shining, exalt the virtues of peace (and make war), create sublime works of art, erect lofty monuments (and commit heinous crimes). Yet, there are men and women who disdain creature comforts, who are impervious to weather and who seek in solitude and silence the voice and light of God. They are the monks and the nuns, fastidious Christians who have returned to the “desert,” as the ancient Essences did before them, to live hidden from prying eyes as God’s servants.
The cloister is to hermits what the desert was to the prophets: a refuge, a vision of Jerusalem, a holy temple where monks and nuns are united by a pact of friendship and common charity, an epiphanic bond wonderful in its intensity. Engaged in an unspoken dialogue no one else will hear, these self-effaced denizens have been called “selfish and arrogant misanthropes.” They have been accused of being out of touch with reality, of shunning the world’s challenges and responsibilities.
Monastery life is often portrayed as sheltered, idyllic, offering an ambience in which monks and nuns live simply and comfortably, sustained by old traditions of spiritual and social support. Or we imagine trance-filled mystics preoccupied with daily prayer and meditation, emaciated men and women weakened by prolonged fasting, self-flagellation and other indignities against the body.
“Fasting and mortification are neither encouraged nor proscribed, though they can help appease the hungers of the soul,” Ben Adam insists. “These actions are strictly a matter of individual choice.”
No matter how strong their community, monastics must also interface with one-another, work to support themselves, living in colonies supplied by a common storehouse, wearing common vestments, drawing from a common treasury. And once alone in the cubiculum, they must confront inner struggles, ponder the interplay between faith and humanness, between transcendence and mortality.
“Life is a parenthesis in eternity,” Ben Adam suggests. “It opens at birth, closes upon death. The sentence it circumscribes is both chronicle and epitaph. We are free to choose the words of which it is composed.”
Solitude is the mainstay of traditional monastic life
“Only within the cloister walls can inner solitude find safety from a world driven by noise. Solitude yields exquisite inner peace. Every spiritual step that leads deeper into the silence helps touch and tap into out soul.”
“What is silence,” I ask.
“Silence has two faces. External silence, or the absence of noise, is that stillness which is perceived by the ear. If you listen carefully, you can hear it resonate all around you. Inner silence is absolute. It leads to meditation and prepares the soul to receive God. Without silence, undernourished and buffeted by the storms of life, the soul can atrophy.”
“What is the difference between meditation and prayer?”
“Meditation empties the mind, puts it in neutral and readies the body for the inner silence the body craves. Prayer is an idiom of silence. Prayer is the last line of defense against the ravages of faithlessness.”
“The world is gravely ill, physically, morally, intellectually. Does this encourage or discourage people from entering the orders?”
“Moral degeneration, war, global discontent, and ego have all advanced the cause of spirituality, increased the craving for a mystical life.”
“One last question. What induced you to become a monk?”
“What induced you to become a journalist?”
“I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. It was, shall I say, preordained. I just obeyed the call.”
Ben Adam must have smiled, though I couldn’t tell. I had answered my own question, spared him extra words and, at last, returned him to the silence from whence he came.
We are all mystics under the skin. We crave silence but once exposed we are discomfited by it. We feat it, shun it. We don’t know what to do with it. We have been conditioned against it. Only a chosen few accept its hospitality.
The 21st century has killed silence. Modern technology has overwhelmed the earth with noise. The frenetic pace of life has intensified the clamor. Some find comfort and safety in the teeming throng. For others, there is sanctity in silence, resonance in seclusion.
It is comforting to know that amid the mindless cacophony, the crowded spaces, the aimless motion and the empty rhetoric that animate the world, silence and peace and harmony prevail in monasteries and covenants. They are the world’s last refuges of stillness. Perhaps they are what the world needs. Because silence is said to be God’s abode, God’s future may well depend on the lost, the found and the reborn who give it shelter.
W.E. Gutman is a veteran journalist on assignment in Central America since 1991.
Sacrificing silence in exchange for anonymity and stirred by an ageless passion, a Carthusian monk has agreed to reach out beyond the cloister walls and touch the world. I shall call him Ben Adam, meaning Son of Man.
It’s early morning. Before me, a steep expanse of granite rises against a pewter sky, dwarfing weathered ridges, dense forrest and narrow ravines, dominating the valley below. In this magnificent desolation, crowning a rocky bluff and seemingly untouched by calamity or the passage of time, stands the Monastère de la Grande Chartreuse.
In June 1084, on this stretch of wilderness in southeastern France, Saint Bruno, a canon from Cologne and six followers founded an order, the Carthusians, whose members share, in almost total solitude and virtual silence, a life syncopated by labor and study, marked by self-denial and eased by contemplation and prayer.
The monastery’s lean medieval geometry clings to time, a metaphor to its own immutability. Eight fires, some deliberately set by waves of marauding feudal landlords, self-exile, landslides, persecution and banishment have tested the faith and tenacity of the Carthusian Order. Its spires loom through the barren treetops but no one goes beyond the massive wooden doors. You may approach, but you cannot enter unless you are prepared to make, as Ben Adam did, the most solemn vow of all.
The monastery turns to the world an austere visage. Half-fortress, half-cloister, its stone walls and slate pepperpot towers soar skyward like hands fused in prayer. But what this edifice protects and upholds are silence and solitude — fragile, easily broken — and unwavering faith. Inside, starkness and parsimony reign. Introspection and worship suffer no distraction.
Called an hermitage and consisting of a four-room dwelling, living quarters are Spartan. On the upper floor is an anteroom and the cubiculum where monks spend virtually their entire life. Beds are rustic. There is an oratory, a rough-hewn narrow desk, a bookshelf, a pot-bellied wood burning stove and a dining table set against a window facing the surrounding mountains. The lower level consists of a small vegetable garden, a workshop and a wood shed.
Life at the monastery
Ben Adam is at his desk. I will not see his face but his voice is soft and firm, his laughter filled with grace and warmth. My questions, clumsy or overly solicitous, amuse him. But his answers are well-pondered and cogent, his arguments devoid of sophistry or equivocation.
Ben Adam is infinitely patient. Time is always on the side of those who need not measure it, who crave silence and solitude, who find strength in ascetisism and are energized by self-denial. For them, all time stands still. They have heard the voice, seen the beckoning light and exultantly rushed into God’s arms. Such are the choices and rewards of monasticism.
What draws some of us to such an existence? What ideal takes people away from the din and follies of society into the sepulchral shadows of solitude and silence? What irresistible voice calls men and women to give themselves to the strict routine, social isolation and sexual abstinence of monastic life?
“It is an unmet need for the spiritual love that only prayer can deliver,” Ben Adam murmurs.
To appreciate the eremitic life, it is helpful to see those who answer its call as they see themselves — men and women who seek and find God. Their destiny, their stated mission: to help bring world peace through the power of prayer.
“There is too much emphasis on doing and producing, not enough on the truth of being, on the need to be,” says Ben Adam. “Undernourished and abused by the torments of modern life, the soul shrivels and dies.”
To be human is to host the seeds of contradiction and ambiguity, to entertain paradox, to stroke the flames of incongruity. Most of us favor rich food and warmth, seek the company of our peers, raise families, feel happier when the sun is shining, exalt the virtues of peace (and make war), create sublime works of art, erect lofty monuments (and commit heinous crimes). Yet, there are men and women who disdain creature comforts, who are impervious to weather and who seek in solitude and silence the voice and light of God. They are the monks and the nuns, fastidious Christians who have returned to the “desert,” as the ancient Essences did before them, to live hidden from prying eyes as God’s servants.
The cloister is to hermits what the desert was to the prophets: a refuge, a vision of Jerusalem, a holy temple where monks and nuns are united by a pact of friendship and common charity, an epiphanic bond wonderful in its intensity. Engaged in an unspoken dialogue no one else will hear, these self-effaced denizens have been called “selfish and arrogant misanthropes.” They have been accused of being out of touch with reality, of shunning the world’s challenges and responsibilities.
Monastery life is often portrayed as sheltered, idyllic, offering an ambience in which monks and nuns live simply and comfortably, sustained by old traditions of spiritual and social support. Or we imagine trance-filled mystics preoccupied with daily prayer and meditation, emaciated men and women weakened by prolonged fasting, self-flagellation and other indignities against the body.
“Fasting and mortification are neither encouraged nor proscribed, though they can help appease the hungers of the soul,” Ben Adam insists. “These actions are strictly a matter of individual choice.”
No matter how strong their community, monastics must also interface with one-another, work to support themselves, living in colonies supplied by a common storehouse, wearing common vestments, drawing from a common treasury. And once alone in the cubiculum, they must confront inner struggles, ponder the interplay between faith and humanness, between transcendence and mortality.
“Life is a parenthesis in eternity,” Ben Adam suggests. “It opens at birth, closes upon death. The sentence it circumscribes is both chronicle and epitaph. We are free to choose the words of which it is composed.”
Solitude is the mainstay of traditional monastic life
“Only within the cloister walls can inner solitude find safety from a world driven by noise. Solitude yields exquisite inner peace. Every spiritual step that leads deeper into the silence helps touch and tap into out soul.”
“What is silence,” I ask.
“Silence has two faces. External silence, or the absence of noise, is that stillness which is perceived by the ear. If you listen carefully, you can hear it resonate all around you. Inner silence is absolute. It leads to meditation and prepares the soul to receive God. Without silence, undernourished and buffeted by the storms of life, the soul can atrophy.”
“What is the difference between meditation and prayer?”
“Meditation empties the mind, puts it in neutral and readies the body for the inner silence the body craves. Prayer is an idiom of silence. Prayer is the last line of defense against the ravages of faithlessness.”
“The world is gravely ill, physically, morally, intellectually. Does this encourage or discourage people from entering the orders?”
“Moral degeneration, war, global discontent, and ego have all advanced the cause of spirituality, increased the craving for a mystical life.”
“One last question. What induced you to become a monk?”
“What induced you to become a journalist?”
“I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. It was, shall I say, preordained. I just obeyed the call.”
Ben Adam must have smiled, though I couldn’t tell. I had answered my own question, spared him extra words and, at last, returned him to the silence from whence he came.
We are all mystics under the skin. We crave silence but once exposed we are discomfited by it. We feat it, shun it. We don’t know what to do with it. We have been conditioned against it. Only a chosen few accept its hospitality.
The 21st century has killed silence. Modern technology has overwhelmed the earth with noise. The frenetic pace of life has intensified the clamor. Some find comfort and safety in the teeming throng. For others, there is sanctity in silence, resonance in seclusion.
It is comforting to know that amid the mindless cacophony, the crowded spaces, the aimless motion and the empty rhetoric that animate the world, silence and peace and harmony prevail in monasteries and covenants. They are the world’s last refuges of stillness. Perhaps they are what the world needs. Because silence is said to be God’s abode, God’s future may well depend on the lost, the found and the reborn who give it shelter.
W.E. Gutman is a veteran journalist on assignment in Central America since 1991.
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