A post throughout each week of the month, offering quotes and resources linked to one contemporary author who writes about silence and its role as a spiritual discipline.
The first week of each month has a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the text below it. In other weeks, the short quote is taken from a longer one by the month's author, found below the image. The last week of the month has a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images.
​Ruth Haley Barton, our author for July, lives in the USA, where she is a well-known writer about books on spirituality, a retreat leader and has a particular ministry focusing on the spiritual formation of Christian leaders.

You can read more about Ruth Haley Barton's book, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (SPCK, 2021 [2004]), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Guided Meditation to use with short and long quotes:
​For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's quote, click the play button on the image. To pause, and restart, click in the same place. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner.
Lectio Divina to use with longer quotes:
​For an audio guided Lectio Divina to use with this week's longer quote, click the play button on the image. Allow 10-15 minutes for this practice. 
​​​To pause, and restart, click in the same place. ​
​For a text version of the Lectio Divina meditation, click the button.
Monday 1st July , 2024
Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (SPCK, 2021 [2004]), 11.
Image: Andrew Gloor, Denver, Colorado, unsplash.com/andrewgloor

​​​To read more about Ruth Haley Barton's book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
 
​Ruth Haley Barton was born in the summer of 1960. Her work as part of the pastoral staff teams for several churches and her training as a Spiritual Director at the widely respected Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation (see here) equipped Ruth with a wealth of lived experience in what has become her passion: nurturing the spiritual development of Christians involved in leadership. Ruth has conveyed much of this wisdom in multiple books, with titles ranging from Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (2004), which is now 20 years old and from which this month's quotes will be taken, via Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry (2008), to her most recent book, Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again (2022). You can read about these and all her other books here. For an hour-long conversation about ideas from this month's book about solitude and silence, click here. And there's a 50 minute conversation about silence, solitude, sabbath rest and why there are no emergencies with God - clearly combining material from a variety of her books! - here. Unusually, many of the books by this month's author are available as Audible books: for those of you who enjoy engaging with material in this way, click here.

Just over twenty years ago, Ruth established the Transforming Centre (see here ) which exists to facilitate community transformation by creating space for God to strengthen the souls of spiritual leaders and the congregations and organizations that they serve. As part of her leadership, Haley Barton writes a blog called 'Beyond Words: Reflections on the Soul of Leadership' for the Centre, which you can access here. The Centre has lots of other resources that you might like to explore. Ruth is also a podcaster: Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership is rooted in the ideas in her 2008 book of the same name, and you can access the podcast on her personal website, here.

In recognition of her contribution to the field of spiritual formation, some years ago Ruth was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Northern Baptist Seminary, Illinois, where she later became Adjunct Professor of Spiritual Transformation. 
Monday 8th July, 2024
Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (SPCK, 2021 [2004]), 12.
Image: Şahin Sezer Dinçer, Istanbul, unsplash.com/@sahinsezerdincer
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 11-12 of Ruth Haley Barton's book. ​​​​To read more about her book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the  small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner.

'In solitude God begins to free us from our bondage to human expectations, for there we experience God as our ultimate Reality – the One in whom we live and move and have our being. In solitude our thoughts and our mind, our will and our desires are reorientated Godward so we become less and less attracted by external forces and can be more deeply responsive to God’s desire and prayer in us.
 
Silence deepens the experience of solitude. In silence we not only withdraw from the demands of life in the company of others but also allow our own thoughts, strivings and compulsions to settle down so we can hear a truer and more reliable Voice. Reliance on our own thoughts and words, even in our praying, can be one facet of a need to control things, to set the agenda, or at least to know what the agenda is even in our relationship with God. It is in silence that we habitually release our own agendas and our need to control and become more willing and able to give ourselves to God’s loving initiative. In silence we create space for God’s activity rather than filling every minute with our own. …
 
Solitude and silence are not, in the end, about success and failure. They are about showing up and letting God do the rest. They are not an end in themselves; they are merely a means through which we regularly make ourselves available to God for the intimacy of relationship and for the work of transformation that only God can accomplish.'
Monday 15th July, 2024
Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (SPCK, 2021 [2004]), 54.
Image: Anne Nygård, Finland, unsplash.com/@polarmermaid
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 54 and 56 of Ruth Haley Barton's book. ​​​​To read more about her book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
​Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the  small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner.

​'​Silence helps us drop beneath the superficiality of our mental constructs to that place of the heart that is deeper in its reality than anything the mind can capture or express in words. It is a place of longing and desire and reaching for that which we do not yet have. In this wordless place the whole of our person turns itself towards God and waits …
 
In silence we begin to recognize that a lot of our God-talk is like the finger that points to the moon. The finger that points to the moon is not the moon. Pointing to the moon, talking about the moon, involving ourselves in study and explanation about how the light of the moon is generated is not the same thing as sitting in moonlight, letting moonbeams fall around us illuminating what they will.  It is not the same thing as noticing how everything is transformed in this numinous light. When we sit in the light of the moon, we don’t try to figure it out, explain or force it to be anything other than what it is. We just enjoy sitting in the midst of it.
 
It is the same with God. Our words about God are not the Reality itself. They are only the finger pointing at the moon. In silence we give in to the fact that our words can never contain God or adequately describe our experiences with God. When we give in to the exhaustion that comes from trying to put everything into words and mental concept, we give our mind permission to just stop. We give ourselves over to the experience of the Reality itself.
 
In the crucible of silence, the wall of mental impasse ceases to be the place where we are skewered by our human impotence and instead becomes the very breast of God.'
Monday 22nd July, 2024
Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (SPCK, 2021 [2004]), 116-117.
Image: Brittney Burnett, Texas, USA, unsplash.com/@brittneyburnett
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 116-117 of Ruth Haley Barton's book. ​​​​To read more about her book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
​Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the  small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner.

‘The practices of solitude and silence do, in time, bring us full circle – back into life in the human community. Whether we have been away for a half an hour of solitude, had an extended retreat time or have dropped completely out of sight for a while, God, in his time, does eventually bring us back to the life he has given us. Perhaps nothing in our external circumstances has changed, but we have changed, and that’s what our world needs more than anything.
 
Without pressing or pushing or trying to do a great altruistic deed, we discover than much that happens in solitude and silence ends up being “for others” – as paradoxical as that may seem. Our speech patterns are refined by disciplines of silence, because growing self-awareness enables us to choose more truly the words we say. Rather than speech that issues from subconscious needs to impress, to put others in their place, to compete, to control and manipulate, to repay hurt with hurt, we now notice our inner dynamics and choose to speak from a different place, a place of love, trust and true wisdom that God is cultivating within us. Over time we become safer for other seeking souls, because we are able to be with them and the issues they are dealing with without being hooked by our own anxieties and fears. We are comfortable with our humanity, because we have experienced Gods love and compassion in that place, and so it becomes very natural for us to extend love and compassion to others in their humanity.’
Monday 29th July, 2024
Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence (SPCK, 2021 [2004]), 90.
Image: Ana Itonishvili, Tblisi, Georgia, unsplash.com/@anitonishvili

​The last week of each month offers some questions to help you reflect further on its quotations and images, and how they resonate with your own spiritual journey and relationship with God.
You can engage with these using the written text or the audio version of the questions, below.
Listen to the reflection questions:
To listen to the reflection questions, below, being read, click the play button on the 'Reflect ...' image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner.

​​Reflection questions:
​Before reflecting on this month's quotes and images, take time to re-ground yourself in your body.
Perhaps take a few slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and be aware of how your body feels in this moment.

​1) Read back over or listen again to this month's quotes and spend time looking at their associated images. As you do so, note a phrase or image that draws your attention. If this is a phrase, you might like to write this out in a journal or on a piece of paper where you will see it regularly. Consider reading aloud several times what you have written to help the words sink more deeply into your heart. If an image resonates with you, let your gaze rest lightly on it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to speak to your heart. Consider using it as a screensaver for a while, or perhaps print it out and place it somewhere that you will see it often.

2) What emerges as you sit with the phrase or image that attracted your attention? Does a new insight or a question, emotion or sensation arise? Take some time to write down and ponder on whatever you notice. 

3) Where can you see hope in the midst of what is emerging in you, for yourself, your neighbour, your community, or the planet? How might this impact your daily life and those with whom you share it? 
​
4) In the days and weeks to come, how can you stay open to what you have discovered from your reflections?
​
Take some time to give thanks for the hope that you have found in this month's quotes and images.
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