Perhaps you have heard of monastic orders that practice an almost absolute silence . . . if so, you heard right!

The Carthusian monks and nuns dwell in silence and solitude all week long, taking their meals alone and praying the Divine Office alone in their cells, at least until the Vespers Office at 4:00 in the afternoon.  They see one another at Mass and on Sundays when they take a three hour walk together and have a meeting of the community in the evening.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?  A day alone and undisturbed!  Then the next day comes, and the next, and the next, and the next. Some orders support monastic hermits who live alone all or part of their lives, and most orders encourage an occasional sabbatical away from all the … ahem … hustle and bustle and overcrowding in the cloister!

We know that this kind of solitude is not the Lord’s will for us.  We have families and obligations and relationships that He has given.  At the same time, however, we would do well to consider the words of Blaise Pascal:

         All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a quiet room. 

While the Carthusians are not the Order after which we can model ourselves, we can learn from them.  Their motto is “In the name of all, we remain in the Presence of the living God.”  We might adopt a similar motto, with a big difference, and one at least as meaningful . . . “For the love of God, we abide in His Son, Who abides in us.”

This we certainly can do: when we have half an hour or half a day or perhaps even half a week alone, if the rest of the family goes camping or circumstances take us away from home for a few days, we can look for ways to spend our free time completely free of disturbances.  On a business trip, during a hospital stay, or during a short retreat, some might, by their nature, be inclined to go exploring and some might just turn on the television, but if opportunity knocks and the door opens to SOLITUDE, we might try to take some of it, even a big dose of it, and see what it is like to be still in a quiet room with God.

Would others like to suggest a motto for our Cor Unum stillness?  Let’s see what we think, and how we think of ourselves here in the stillness of this heart’s monastery.

Semanque Abbey, dormitory

Ioan Sameli, by permission, Wikipedia