Thursday, April 16 : John Tauler

Like Mary, every servant of God must be silent and calm in herself quite often, must shut herself up within herself, hide in the spirit so as to shield herself and escape from the senses and to make for herself a place of silence and of interior rest. This interior rest is what is being sung…: “For when peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, Your all-powerful word from heaven’s royal throne bounded, a fierce warrior, into the doomed land,” (Wis 18:14-15), when the eternal Word came out of the Father’s heart. True silence reigns in the midst of silence, at the very moment when all things are plunged into the greatest silence; that is when one truly hears this Word. For if you want God to speak, you must be silent; all things must go out so that he might enter. When our Lord Jesus entered Egypt, all the country’s idols collapsed. Your idols are all that prevents this eternal birth from happening in you in a true and immediate way, no matter how good and holy these things might seem. Our Lord said: “I have come to bring a sword” (Mt 10:34) to sever all that stems from the human person… For your enemy is that which is closest to you: that multiplicity of images that conceal the Word in you.
Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team