Supporting texts

«The spirit that is not scattered outwardly, that is not dissipated through the world by way of the senses, returns to itself and rises to the thought of God. Then, shining and resplendent with divine beauty, it forgets its own nature… free from every earthly care, it directs all its zeal to acquiring eternal goods.»

García M. Colombás, El monacato primitivo, p. 691 (quoting St Basil, Letter 2).

«If the door of a bathhouse is opened, it soon loses its heat; the same happens with the soul that thinks of nothing but talking: even if it says only good things, it will soon lose and dissipate its remembrance… Silence is therefore something excellent: it is the father of all good thoughts.»

Diadochus of Photice, quoted in I. Hausherr, Soledad y vida contemplativa (Burgos 1979), pp. 86-87 (quoted in turn in the introduction to volume I of the Philokalia, p. 69).

Suggested practice

Making our way through the stimuli

Today an indispensable fast, if we want to go ever deeper into the inner hermitage and share daily life there with the Christ of the heart, is the one we can make from digital stimuli or so-called “social networks”. Estranged and alienated, pulled at by a thousand calls for attention… we live astray, outside ourselves. These shop windows, usually showcases of the false self, which tries to build an image of itself to replace the absence of meaning, chain us more than we realise. Living while staring at a small coloured rectangle is not living, though the fascination of such an instrument can skilfully simulate it.

Setting out to truly fast from this activity that exteriorises us is perhaps a utopia. But we could begin by realising the fierce dependence we are in. To do so, switching off (putting the phone in airplane mode) for an hour in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, turning the mobile off earlier than usual at night… can reveal the suffocation we feel when left alone with ourselves. Or alone even with someone beside us: that “stranger” whom we take so much for granted that we no longer look at them or listen to them.

Let us not deceive ourselves: what dependence on the mobile or on social networks reveals is our life in exteriority, that is, that we usually live without a true inner presence; perhaps with our spirit lethargic under the weight of an illusory, fragmented life, prey to meaninglessness. Grace always helps, but more so when we help ourselves. That is to say, when we put forth our best to allow the inner transmutation to which we are called. Let us imitate Jesus, who, imperturbable, made his way through and went on his way.

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