Our little community of the FRIENDS OF SILENCE is an expression of the desire to have all our relations, all of our activity in the world, pass THROUGH Eternity. If we are to participate in bringing the Blessed Community to its completion, we must be still and know God in our inner beings. We invite anyone who shares this dream, this hope, to COME and SEE ... to COME and BE with us each month.
This is our beginning. We welcome your sharings and responses. Please send them by the 15th of each month to Nan at St. Agnes Church.
If you are truly called to a solitary lifestyle, eventually celibacy must follow. Solitude invites the presence of God, a presence which so consumes the soul, there is no lover energy available for an intense human commitment to intimacy. The deeper one goes into spiritual solitude, the lighter one travels. But it is not for us to divest ourselves -- at our own willed choosing -- of the things that are necessary for life within society. It is for God to strip us, often painfully, of them at a time when God knows -- if we do not -- that we must go more lightly into this Heart of Love.
Our culture is losing the art of silence, and with it the intrinsic human understanding and capacity for prayer. Silent dwellers, by creating spacious times of physical silence in their lives, slowly recover the human capacity to be with themselves in a caring gentle way. For, it is in silence and solitude that one learns – or regains – the human quality of being in God's presence always.
