`SILENCE IN HEAVEN'

offices, at the corner of Fleet Street and Whitefriars Street, with unending traffic coming three ways all day long and occasionally gangs of men tearing up the roadway with pneumatic
drills, one can only wish, not know, silence. However . . .
A thousand photographs were assembled for this book. Ninety were chosen to give the down-toearth and up to Heaven authentic truth about that " divine silence which descends upon those who follow the religious way." That silence in which men may best worship and praise God with all their mind and heart and soul. with all their physical strength. all day and every day and through the night hours; and. in spite of their separation from the world, serve all men in the love and worship and service of God.
ACTIVITY
ONE lesson that will force itself
upon your mind as you read and meditate upon the text and pictures in " The Silence of Heaven" is that the price and work and fruit of silence is intense activity. Look at that picture of the bearded monk making a leather sandal run to catch up with the thoughts abounding in that mind -thoughts of God the Maker, God the Provider, the Father upon Whom all the people upon the earth depend for their daily needs. He is so still —yet how strong and lively is that hand holding the sandal; how eager the right hand that holds the file to soft a roughness and make the path smoother for a man who also wishes to walk in the way of
the Lord. (And look at the peace in the face of this man.)
"Silence in Heaven" has been produced for the laity—to explain to them the meaning of monastic life. It was horn in the reactions of monks who out of the corner of their eye have seen "the swarms of well-meaning, rather aimless sightseers who loiter in the vicinity of the cloister and feast their eyes on any monk who comes into view"—visitors who, with eyes wide open, and growing silent with reverence, yet have not the least clue to what goes on, and why, in
the interior of the cloister.
These photographs of the monastic life were taken "with the sole aim of capturing and recording in it the perceptible element of
A SOLID FLOOR
FR. THOMAS MERTON wrote that celebrated book " Elected Silence," and he was appointed to write this book on the nature of Divine silence. What is this silence?
"To those whose vocation it is," writes Fr. Merton, "this silence of God is a docta in ignorantia, a learned ignorance, and a 'despair' that is the mask of perfect hope. And hope also is hidden in silence. "To be ravished from the world of men by the silence of God means, in the end, not that one finds a new and mysterious universe to live in, but that the old, ordinary universe. with all its shabby poverty, while remaining perfectly ordinary, perfectly real, perfectly poor, becomes transfigured from within by a silence which is the supreme and infinite 'poverty' of an infinitely rich and generous God ...
"The silence of God drives the hurricane. and overturns the mountain and stirs up the sea and makes it roar against the cliff. It is from the silence of God that men harrow power for their machines, and it once again by virtue of something hidden in His silence that we uproariously plough up and dissolve even the material elements that make up our fretful universe.
"It is the silence of God that forms the solid floor on which we fight our battles. and if His silence gave out beneath us we would all fall together with out cataclysms into the depths of oblivion."
REAL LIFE
WELL, perhaps that reads like
a part of the up-to-Heaven truth of the matter. So let us have something down to earth— a sentence from a letter written by St. Teresa of Avila: "I wish our house had a bigger garden so that Sister Beatrice might have a little more work to do."
You see, "Silence in Heaven," besides giving von a 20th century