The Divine Office

Nancy over at The Cloistered Heart has a lovely post on the Divine Office. Read about it here.

“Meditative Silence”

Wonder and Beauty

Rogier van der Weyden (Flemish painter, 1400-1464) Magdalen Reading (fragment of an altarpiece)

“There are layers of silence,  Van der Weyden’s Magdalen is deeply silent, but she is reading.  Her mind is active, and willed into activity.  This, then, is a mitigated silence, since we are only receptive to the thoughts of what we are reading.  The Magdalen is obviously reading the scriptures, and meditating on what she reads, but her silence can only be between passages of reading and will be concerned with those passages.  If we do not read with intervals of silent reflection, we will understand only part of what we read.  This is a fractured silence, good but imperfect.  We all need to read, to keep our spirit alert, to have an inner texture, as it were, that can respond to the absolutes of pure soundlessness, but this chosen, meditative layer, is the least significant.”  (Sr…

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