Monday 10th May, 2021
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006), 3.
Image: Dmitry Osipenko, osipictures.com
This quote is by Martin Laird, an Augustinian monk and Associate Professor of Early Christian Studies at Villanova University, USA. It comes from the first of his trilogy of books about silence, Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation (Daron, Longman and Todd, 2006), 3. Each book is quite a demanding and heavy read. Instead, you might prefer to listen to a two-part podcast interview with Martin, Silent Land, Luminous Ocean, here, produced by the Encountering Silence podcast team. This is an amazing resource about silence and well worth exploring. See also his two later books, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness and Contemplation (Oxford University Press, 2011) and An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation and Liberation (Oxford University Press, 2019).