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4th December
Bieke Vandekerckhove, The Taste of Silence: How I Came to be At Home with Myself (Liturgical Press, 2015), 119.
Image: Tom Barrett, Miluwakee, Wisconsin, unsplash.com/@wistomsin
'To be at home with yourself (habitare secum in latin) is a basic exercise in the Benedictine tradition. It means to take time every day to listen in silence to what is within you. In other words, that you insert moments in which you dwell with yourself in silence, no matter how difficult it may be. Monks sit on a bench, Zen practitioners on a meditation cushion, but basically they do the same thing: they introduce moments in which they are with themselves in silence.
We find that rather strange. Why would you apply yourself to something as silly? A waste of your time, we say. But more than anything, we find it difficult. Why endure turmoil, confusion, and gloominess, when there are so many attractive ways to escape from all that? We would rather evade silence than look for it. At least, that’s the way it was and is for me. Yet, I know, these spiritual traditions have a point. What that point is you can only discover by doing it yourself. It has to do with one’s life fulfilment. But what this fulfilment contains, you can only experience by walking that path yourself. …
It is said of Benedict that he was at home with himself. Isn’t it beautiful to be able to say that of somebody? Don’t you wish right away that you could meet such a person? I wanted to learn this being at home with myself, no matter how afraid I was of it.'
To read the unfolding narrative of each day's Advent Adventures with Silence short quotes in order, click the image of the blue tin mug.
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