![]() God asked him to be an ongoing holocaust and a silent offering for the world’s salvation next to my friend, I became a pupil, learning the mystery of suffering. My experience was that, despite that painful situation, Brother Vincent remained serene, joyful and patient. He showed us that the silence into which illness had plunged him allowed him to enter ever more deeply into the truth of things. “Brother Vincent was incapable of uttering a simple sentence because the sickness deprived him of the use of speech. Nicolas noticed that in Brother Vincent I soon “recognized an ardent soul, a hidden saint, a great friend of God.” This friendship was born in silence, it grew in silence, and it continues to exist in silence. Brother Vincent used to say, “I believe that suffering is granted by God to man in a great design of love and mercy.” The most sublime expression of love is suffering and dying, that is, the silent and total offering of our life. ![]() My link with Brother Vincent started when I learnt he was offering up to God all his sufferings to obtain from God for me the graces necessary for the correct fulfillment of my ministry in Rome. In return, they are not hindered by outside noise (no TV, no radio, no newspapers, no internet) in order to pray intensely for the whole world.Īt the bedside of Brother Vincent, a Carthusian monk who died a painful death from multiple sclerosis, you confronted the mystery of God’s silence in the face of incurable illness. Thanks to that everlasting silence, they are able to listen to God’s Word, in the reading of the Bible, in the Divine Office and in their mental prayer. Last but not least, their silence also consists in not leaving any traces of themselves: They do not sign the books they (seldom) happen to publish, and they are buried in an anonymous tomb. Their silence is also an effort to empty their memories and imagination from all the “garbage” stocked in them during their lives before becoming monks. The silence of the Carthusians is based not only upon their not chattering together or with people from the outside without special permission from their superior they lead also, all day long, an eremitical life, in separate little houses, having only some prayers and Masses in common in choir, the rest being individual. It starts at a quarter past midnight and lasts nearly three hours in the darkness. I really wanted to experience the silence, the solitude and the presence of God in this sacred place of La Grande Chartreuse and to live and pray with the holy monks, especially the most impressive part of the monks’ life: “While the earth is sleeping, or trying to forget, the nocturnal Divine Office is the burning heart of Carthusian life,” as Nicolas Diat rightly underscores. ![]() One could say: “Truly, the Lord is in this place! How awesome is this shrine! This is none other than the abode of God, the gateway to heaven” (Genesis 28:16-17). All the surroundings of deep solitude, the beauty of the mountains, the mysterious austerity - in a word, the entire environment seems to be God’s dwelling. La Grande Chartreuse is an absolute desert of silence. On a more personal basis, since I wanted to write a book about silence, I deemed it useful to go to the most silent place in the Catholic Church. ![]() What brought the prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments to the monastery?Īs prefect for the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, I wished to see firsthand the specificities of the Carthusian liturgy, slightly different from the Roman rite. Your new book, The Power of Silence, is grounded in a dialogue with the prior general of the Carthusian Order, Dom Dysmas de Lassus, based at La Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps.
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