In the Christian Calendar, the three most important days of the year begin, ones which give meaning to sustain the rest of the year. They are days for reflection, punctuated by old familiar rituals of water and fire. We all need rhythms in our lives, moments of celebration – religious or otherwise – allowing us time to pause and take a break from the rush of our working lives. Ritual days like these, which mark the passing of time are very important, especially in this modern age which blends each day and each season into periods of work and possibilities for more shopping. We need to ensure that there are real moments of non-work in our lives where we celebrate other realities and other rhythms, not just evenings where we crash, tired from work, trying to recharge before it starts again the next day. These rhythms are indispensable for balance and for nourishing our deepest self. We take time off, we slow down, we rest and reflect. In doing so we find that each element in the familiar patterns becomes, even though they are known through repetition, fresh and meaningful again. The messages that come around again in the great cycle of things are always new.
Wherever the arts are nourished through the festive contemplation of universal realities and their sustaining reasons, there in truth something like a liberation occurs: the stepping-out into the open under an endless sky, not only for the creative artist himself but for the beholder as well, even the most humble. Such liberation, such fore-shadowing of the ultimate and perfect fulfillment, is necessary for man, almost more necessary than his daily bread, which is indeed indispensable and yet insufficient. In this precisely do I see the meaning of that statement in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, ‘We work so we can have leisure.’
Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation
Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. . . . Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: “Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me.” Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth.
