Quoting Silence, May 2024:
A month with
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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.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, our author for May, is renowned for two things in particular: weaving insights from Eastern Christianity, gleaned in her upbringing in the Russian Orthodox Church, with her later engagement with Western Christianity; and her work in Social Justice.
Read more about Catherine de Hueck Doherty's book, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man (Madonna House publications, 1993 [1974]), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Read more about Catherine de Hueck Doherty's book, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man (Madonna House publications, 1993 [1974]), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
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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. |
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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. |
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Monday 6th May, 2024
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man (Madonna House Publications, 1993 [1974]), 28.
Image: Marc-Oliver Jodoin, Ottawa, Canada, unsplash.com/@marcojodoin
To read more about Catherine de Hueck Doherty's book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896-1985: a contemporary of the more well-known Dorothy Day, 1897-1980, who established the Catholic Worker Movement in the USA in 1933 - see here) was born into a wealthy Russian Orthodox Christian family who moved around the world following her father's postings as an insurance agent. At 15, she married her first cousin, Baron Boris de Hueck, who was 21. During the First World War, Catherine served as a nurse on the front line. Towards the end of the War the couple fled the Russian Revolution and, after stints in Finland and London, where Catherine was received into the Roman Catholic Church, eventually emigrated to Canada. Her experiences of a period of poverty as immigrants informed Catherine's future work.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, her marriage was not happy. Dissatisfied with a life of (new) material comforts, Catherine followed a deep call to give away all she owned and moved to work in the slums of Toronto. Here she established Toronto Friendship House as a source of food and clothing for the poor, and organised activities for young people. It was also a base from which she, and the community that gathered around her radical gospel message, used the social encyclicals of the popes to counter Communist propaganda. Read more of this story in her book, Friendship House (Sheed and Ward, 1946), and further info about this and the next phase of her life, here. Building on this work, in 1938 Catherine moved to Harlem, New York and set up another Friendship House as an interracial apostolate community, living with and serving the black community, and lecturing about racial justice.
Catherine's marriage was annulled in 1943 and shortly after she married Eddie Doherty, an Irish-American writer, who later became a priest in the Melkite rite of the Catholic Church - see here - after they had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in 1955. Before this, in 1947 they moved back to Canada, establishing Madonna House in Ontario. It became an apostolic community of lay women and men, and ordained priests. By 2022 it had grown into a community of more than 200 members, with 16 houses in six countries: see here.
Madonna House's publishing wing keeps Catherine's numerous books in print. The book from which this month's quotes are taken, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man, is one of a series of six in her 'Madonna House Classics'. You can see the full set here. For a list of all her available publications, see here. Her writing, though very much of its time - always gendering God as male and in a tone that can seem quite dated today - beautifully combines rich insights from the Eastern Christian tradition and its emphasis on 'prayer of the heart' with stories of her lived experience as a follower of Christ.
Those of you who enjoy watching youtube episodes about our authors, see here for a 25 minute presentation on The Spirituality of Catherine de Hueck Doherty: some of this is photos and a significant chunk is an interview about her with Fr Bob Wild, a former priest at Madonna House. For a short, six-minute video of Catherine speaking, see here. Since 2000 the cause for her canonisation as a Saint was presented to and is under consideration by the Roman Catholic Church.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, her marriage was not happy. Dissatisfied with a life of (new) material comforts, Catherine followed a deep call to give away all she owned and moved to work in the slums of Toronto. Here she established Toronto Friendship House as a source of food and clothing for the poor, and organised activities for young people. It was also a base from which she, and the community that gathered around her radical gospel message, used the social encyclicals of the popes to counter Communist propaganda. Read more of this story in her book, Friendship House (Sheed and Ward, 1946), and further info about this and the next phase of her life, here. Building on this work, in 1938 Catherine moved to Harlem, New York and set up another Friendship House as an interracial apostolate community, living with and serving the black community, and lecturing about racial justice.
Catherine's marriage was annulled in 1943 and shortly after she married Eddie Doherty, an Irish-American writer, who later became a priest in the Melkite rite of the Catholic Church - see here - after they had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in 1955. Before this, in 1947 they moved back to Canada, establishing Madonna House in Ontario. It became an apostolic community of lay women and men, and ordained priests. By 2022 it had grown into a community of more than 200 members, with 16 houses in six countries: see here.
Madonna House's publishing wing keeps Catherine's numerous books in print. The book from which this month's quotes are taken, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man, is one of a series of six in her 'Madonna House Classics'. You can see the full set here. For a list of all her available publications, see here. Her writing, though very much of its time - always gendering God as male and in a tone that can seem quite dated today - beautifully combines rich insights from the Eastern Christian tradition and its emphasis on 'prayer of the heart' with stories of her lived experience as a follower of Christ.
Those of you who enjoy watching youtube episodes about our authors, see here for a 25 minute presentation on The Spirituality of Catherine de Hueck Doherty: some of this is photos and a significant chunk is an interview about her with Fr Bob Wild, a former priest at Madonna House. For a short, six-minute video of Catherine speaking, see here. Since 2000 the cause for her canonisation as a Saint was presented to and is under consideration by the Roman Catholic Church.
Monday 13th May, 2024
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man (Madonna House Publications, 1993 [1974]), 29.
Image: Etienne Boulanger, Lyons, unsplash.com/@etienneblg
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 28-29 of Catherine de Hueck Doherty's book. To read more about this book, from which May's quotes are taken, click here.
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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. |
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'True silence is a suspension bridge that a soul in love with God builds to cross the dark, frightening gullies of its own mind, the strange chasms of temptation, the depthless precipices of its own fears that impede its way to God. True silence is the speech of lovers. For only love knows its beauty, completeness, and utter joy. True silence is a garden enclosed, where alone the soul can meet its God. It is a sealed fountain that he alone can unseal to slacken the soul’s infinite thirst for him. True silence is a key to the immense and flaming heart of God. It is the beginning of a divine courtship that will end only in the immense, creative, fruitful, loving silence of final union with the Beloved.
Yes, such silence is holy, a prayer beyond all prayers, leading to the final prayer of constant presence of God, to the heights of contemplation, when the soul, finally at peace, lives by the will of him who she loves totally, utterly, and completely. This silence, then, will break forth in a charity that overflows in the service of the neighbour without counting the cost. It will witness to Christ anywhere, always. Availability will become delightsome and easy, for in each person the soul will see the face of her Love. Hospitality will be deep and real, for a silent heart is a loving heart, and a loving heart is a hospice to the world.
This silence is not the exclusive prerogative of monasteries or convents. This simple, prayerful silence is everybody’s silence—or if it isn’t, it should be. It belongs to every Christian who loves God, to every Jew who has heard in his heart the echoes of God’s voice in his prophets, to everyone whose soul has risen in search of truth, in search of God. For where noise is—inward noise and confusion—there God is not!
Deserts, silence, solitudes are not necessarily places but states of mind and heart. These deserts can be found in the midst of the city, and in the heart of our lives. We need only to look for them and realize our tremendous need for them. They will be small solitudes, little deserts, tiny pools of silence, but the experience they will bring, if we are disposed to enter them, may be as exultant and as holy as all the deserts in the world, even the one God himself entered. For it is God who makes solitude, deserts, and silence holy.'
Monday 20th May, 2024
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man (Madonna House Publications, 1993 [1974]), 32.
Image: Rodrigo Gonzalez, Mexico City, unsplash.com/@eneasmx
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 30-31 & 32 of Catherine de Hueck Doherty's book. To read more about this book, from which May's quotes are taken, click here.
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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. |
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'There is no solitude without silence. True, silence is sometimes the absence of speech—but it is always the act of listening. The mere absence of noise (which is empty of our listening to the voice of God) is not silence. A day filled with noise and voices can be a day of silence, if the noises become for us the echo of the presence of God, if the voices are, for us, messages and solicitations of God. When we speak of ourselves and are filled with ourselves, we leave silence behind. When we repeat the intimate words of God that he has left within us, our silence remains intact.
Silence is truth in charity. It answers him who asks. But it must give only words filled with light. Silence, like everything else, either makes us give ourselves, or it becomes miserliness and avarice, in which we keep ourselves to ourselves. …
Deserts, silence, solitude. For a soul that realizes the tremendous need of all three, opportunities present themselves in the midst of the congested trappings of all the world’s immense cities. But how, really, can one achieve such solitude? By standing still! Stand still, and allow the strange, deadly restlessness of our tragic age to fall away like the worn-out, dusty cloak that it is—a cloak that was once considered beautiful. The restlessness was considered the magic carpet to tomorrow, but now in reality we see it for what it is: a running away from oneself, a turning from that journey inward that all [people] must undertake to meet God dwelling within the depths of their souls.
Stand still, and look into the motivations of life. Are they such that true foundations of sanctity can be built on them? … Stand still, and lifting your hearts and hands to God, pray that the mighty wind of his Holy Spirit may clear all the cobwebs of fear, selfishness, greed, narrow-heartedness away from the soul: that his tongues of flame may descend to give courage to begin again.
All this standing still can be done in the midst of the outward noise of daily living and the duties of state in life. For it will bring order into the soul, God’s order, and God’s order will bring tranquillity, his own tranquillity. And it will bring silence.'
Monday 27th May, 2024
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man (Madonna House Publications, 1993 [1974]), 117.
Image: Josh Nuttall, Edinburgh, unsplash.com/@jnuttall
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.
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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. |
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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.