From Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, The Seventh Dwelling Place":
“In this temple of God, in this divine dwelling place, God alone rejoices with the soul in the deepest silence. There is no reason for the intellect to stir or seek anything for the Lord who created it wishes to give it repose here.”
From St. Jerome,(340-420), Epistula LXIX, :
Everything in the Sacred Book shines and glistens, even in its outer shell: but the marrow of it is sweeter: if you want the kernel, you must break the shell. RefMgr field[22]: 2
From St. Jerome, Epistula LIII add Paulinum, at page 340:
You cannot make your way into the Holy Scriptures without having someone to go before you and show you the road. RefMgr field[22]: 2
2006
From St. Francis de Sales, Oeuvres de Saint Francois de Sales v. 3 (1834) at page 29:
Quantum ore dixerimus, sane cor cordi loquitur, lingua non nisis aures pulsat”: “It has been well said, that heart speaks to heart, whereas language only speaks to the ears. Paraphrased by John Henry Newman for his motto as “Cor ad cor loquitur” [“heart speaks to heart.”
From St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life (1608):
Since prayer places our intellect in the brilliance of God’s light and exposes our will to the warmth of his heavenly love, nothing else so effectively purifies our intellect of ignorance and our will of depraved affections. It is a stream of holy water that flows forth and makes the plants of our good desires grow green and flourish and quenches the passions within our hearts.”
From The Rule of Saint Benedict:
B. The goals of monastic life. 1. Listen my son to the instructions of your Master, turn the ear of your heart to the advice of a loving father; accept it willingly and carry it out vigorously; so that through toil of obedience you may return to him from whom you have separated by the sloth of disobedience. Benedict, Prologue. 2. We propose, therefore to establish a school of the Lord’s service, . . . . On the contrary, through the continual practice of monastic observance and the life of faith, our hearts are opened wide, and the way of God’s commandments is run in a sweetness of love that is beyond words. Let us then never withdraw from discipleship to him, but persevering in his teaching in the monastery till death, let us share the sufferings of Christ through patience, and so deserve also to share in his kingdom. Benedict, Prologue. C. The monastic understanding of spiritual experience. 1. Proverbs 16:32 Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city. 2. There are also the Conferences, and Institutes, and the Lives of the Fathers, and the Rule of the holy Father Basil. What are these works but aids to the attainment of virtue for good-living and obedient monks? But to us who are slothful, who live badly and who are negligent, they bring a blush of shame. Whoever you are, then, who are hurrying forward to your heavenly fatherland, do you with Christ’s help fulfill this little Rule written for beginners; and then you will come at the end, under God’s protection, to those heights of learning and virtue which we have mentioned above. Amen. D. The role of a Rule or Discipline. 1. To you, then, whoever you may be, are my words addressed, who, by the renunciation of your own will, are taking up the strong and glorious weapons of obedience in order to do battle in the service of the Lord Christ, the true King. Benedict, Prologue. 2. So they do not live according to their own wills, nor obey their own desires and pleasures, but behaving in accordance with the rule and judgement of another, they live in monasteries and desire to have an Abbot ruling over them. Without doubt such men imitate the mind of the Lord in his saying, I came to not my own will, but that of him who sent me. Benedict, Chapter V. E. The role of Silence. 1. Here the prophet teaches that if we should sometimes for the sake of the virtue of silence refrain even from good conversation, we should all the more, for fear of the penalty of sin, refrain from evil words. Benedict, Chapter VI. F. The role of Scripture. 1. Let us then at last arouse ourselves, even as Scripture incites us in the words. Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep. Let us, then, open our eyes to the divine light, and hear with our ears the divine voice as it cries out to us daily. Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, and again, He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches. And what does the Spirit say? Come, my sons, listen to me; I shall teach you the fear of the Lord. 2. For is not every page of the Old or New Testament, every word of the Divine Author, a most direct rule for our human life? Benedict, Chapter 73. G. The role of Prayer. 1. As soon as the signal for the Divine Office is heard, the brethren must leave whatever they have been engaged in doing, and hasten with all speed; but with dignity, so that foolishness finds no stimulus. Nothing, therefore, is to be given preference over the Work of God. Benedict, Chapter 43. 2. Prayer, therefore, should be short and pure, unless on occasion it be drawn out by the feeling of the inspiration of divine grace. In community, however, the prayer should be kept quite short, and when the superior gives the sign all should rise together. Benedict, Chapter 20. H. The role of humility. 1. So, brothers, if we wish to reach the highest peak of humility, and to arrive quickly at that state of heavenly exaltation which is attained in the present life through humility, then that ladder which appeared to Jacob in his dream, on which he saw angels going up and down, must be set up, so that we may mount by our own actions. Certainly that going down and up is to be understood by us in the sense that we go down through pride and up through humility. The ladder itself that is set up is our life in this world, and the setting up is effected by the Lord in the humbled heart. The sides of the ladder we call the body and soul, and in them the divine call inserts the diverse rungs of humility and (interior) discipline. Benedict, Chapter VII. 2. Thus when all these steps of humility have been climbed, the monk will soon reach that love of God which, being perfect, drives out all fear. Through this love all the practices which before he kept somewhat fearfully, he now begins to keep effortlessly and naturally and habitually, influenced now not by any fear of hell but by the force of long practice, and the very delight he experiences in virtue. These things the Lord, working through his Holy Spirit, will deign to show in his workman, when he has been purified from vice and sin. Benedict Chapter VII. I. The role of music. 1. We must therefore consider how we should behave in the sight of the Divine Majesty and his Angels, and as we sing our Psalms let us see to it that our mind is in harmony with our voice. Benedict, Chapter 29. J. The role of hospitality. 1. All who arrive as guests are to be welcomed like Christ, for he is going to say, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. . . . .and when guests arrive or depart the greatest humility should be shown in addressing them: so, let Christ who is received in them be adored with bowed head or prostrate body. Benedict, Chapter 53. 2. Special care is to be shown in the reception of the poor and of pilgrims, for in them especially is Christ received; for the awe felt for the wealthy imposes respect enough of itself. Benedict, Chapter 53. F. The role of work. 1. Idleness is the enemy of soul. For this reason the brethren should be occupied at certain times in manual labor, and at other times in sacred reading. Benedict, Chapter 48. G. The role of poverty/property. 1. Among you there can be no question of personal property. Rather take care that you share everything in common. Augustine, Rule 1.3 2. It is of the greatest importance that this vice [claiming personal property] should be totally eradicated from the monastery. . . . Everything should be common to all, as it is written, and no one should call anything his own or treat it as such. Benedict, Chapter 33. 3. It is better to be able to make do with a little than to have plenty. Augustine, Rule 3.5.
From Sister Janet Ruffing, Professor of Spirituality at Fordham University:
We have a choice whether we will fill up the natural pauses in between activities with some kind of spaciousness of consciousness or with some form of stimulation such as radio or television shows.
1982
From Rosemary Radford Ruether, Disputed Questions; On Being a Christian, Journeys in Faith series, Robert A Raines, Editor Nashville: Abingdon, 1982:
26 [Robert Palmer] taught me to revere the works of Werner Jaeger and Walter Otto. From Otto, Palmer took his favorite formula, “First the god, then the dance, and finally the story.” All religions begin in theophany, the real encounter with the numinous, present in a particular way in a particular time and place. “God” in this sense is plural: “the gods.” Although the underlying reality of the divine may be one, the appearances of the divine are necessarily many and distinct according to different configurations of site, community and historical moment. The gods are no mere “idols” or human projections, to be unfavorably contrasted with the one true God of biblical revelation. The god experienced in the oracle of Eleusis was not less real than that which appeared to Moses in the burning bush. The theophany of encounter with the numinous expresses itself first of all in cult; that is to say in ritual action. The presence of the god is reenacted, made present again, first of all in dance and drama. Only afterward is it formulated as word or story. In that sense theology, the systematizing of the stories, is the stage farthest removed from the actual experience of the god.
This insight was, for me, a valuable aid, not only in taking ancient piety seriously, but also in understanding biblical religion. One cannot start, as I had been taught to do, by asking if you “agree with the doctrine.” Rather one must first work back to the story, then to the dance, and finally to glimpse the experience that lies behind these expressions. Only then can you begin to understand what the verbal reflection really means. It was from Palmer I discovered that a religious proposition, such as Christ’s resurrection, is not primarily a doctrine demanding rational assent to a “fact” about something that happened to someone else long ago, unrelated to myself. Rather it is a statement about something that could “happen to me”; about the renewal of my life.
32 [The legacy of the great year cycle of Near Eastern cultic experience] takes on another dimension of critical insight only when transformed by that religious genius that, as far as I know, is uniquely Hebraic. It is this genius that transforms the Canaanite year cycle of natural-social renewal into the prophetic dialectic of judgment and promise. The scene of the drama has shifted from seasonal cycles to historical crisis.
There is no way to retreat back to the first world and do justice to the realities of Western society. Western consciousness and action, and increasingly that of the whole world, have been decisively shaped by the Hebraic transformation of seasonal theophanies. This is not a question of nature over against society, but rather nature and society together, the human and nonhuman cosmos as one, appearing differently, depending on whether it is viewed through the theophany of being or the crisis of historical judgment. One might almost see this as the distinction of the aesthetic and the ethical. This does not mean that there are no ethics, personal and social, in the Near Eastern and Greek backgrounds. But this is seen more as the restoration of imminent harmony rather than historical conversion and decision against the dark background of human historical apostasy. Only the Hebraic religious vision has the categories to embrace this second dialectic.
This does not mean that all parts of the canonical Bible rise to the promise of prophetic faith. At its best, prophetic faith represents a decisive break with the pattern of religion that makes the divine a confirming theophany of the existing social order. Instead, the existing social order as a hierarchy of rich over poor, the powerful over the weak, is seen as contrary to God’s will, an apostasy to God’s intent for creational community. The revelation of God therefore appears as a judgment against this apostate order. God comes as advocate of the oppressed, overturner of an unjust order, whose action in history points forward to a reconstructed community that will fulfill God’s intent for creation, a time when God’s will shall “be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” Heaven, in this language, is neither the confirming halo of existing creation, nor is it another world into which we can escape from this world. Rather it is the mandate of that rectified world that stands as judgment and hope over against things as they are.
But even when biblical texts are most clearly in this prophetic mode, not all dimensions of unjust relations may be discerned. The prophet may see clearly the injustice of rich urbanites against impoverished country-fold, or of imperial nations against the small and scattered nation, but may miss entirely the injustice of master-slave relations, of male-female relations in patriarchal, slave-holding society, or else ameliorate these relations in more conventional ways that still take the basic system for granted.
The vision of the world rectified may also degenerate into a vision of world reversal, or “revenge theology,” that merely makes of the presently poor and weak new imperial powers triumphing over their former enemies. In significant parts of the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament, the prophetic vision evaporates allowing God again to become simply the sanctifier of the existing social order, as in much of the law codes and the New Testament household codes. Even at its best, prophetic insight has some limitations of the sociology of consciousness of its spokesmen (generic not intended). It cannot raise truly critical questions from the context of those who have not yet gained the voice to raise such questions, specifically women and slaves.
The prophetic dialectic I believe to be the critical norms of biblical faith. But it is a norm that existed in the communities reflected in the texts by constantly struggling against more conventional ways of understanding religion as a sanctification of existing power structures or power dreams. It is partial, as all critical insight is partial, for we can see the dialectic of injustice and new possibility only from one context, not from all contexts. It is constantly manifesting itself in new ways in new contexts. In the Old Testament prophets it arises first as a way of critiquing naive nationalism. It also sets itself against religion and religious elites who use religion to escape from the questions of justice, “I hate the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen,” cries the prophet Amos. “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream (5:21, 23-24).
37 My annoyance at Protestant triumphalism did not prevent me from exploring a variety of Christian traditions. My graduate studies took me through Reformation and modern Protestant theology. I found Luther and Barth very helpful in critiquing institutional self-idolatry. But there remained something in the Augustinian dualism of nature and grace that was foreign to my spirit. My doctoral studies also opened up the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. In spite of the stasis of its historical development, I still suspect that the Orthodox tradition has the most authentic vision of the union of nature and grace, self and cosmos, one that has tended to get lost in the quasi-Marcionism of Western theology.
From Joseph Pothier, Les Melodies Gregoriennes (1880):
True devotion produces as of itself a song; song, in turn excites devotion, and this reciprocal action augments the value of both, like two mirrors, which, facing each other, multiply the same image even to the profondity, so to speak of the infinite.
From Alexander Pope:
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”