prayer & discernment Abbot Christopher takes part in an assembly of Catholic school students at St. Mary’s College in Twickenham, near London, in September 2010
How to nurture inner silence A Benedictine monk whose abbey hosted members of the public in a British reality television program talks about the place of silence in everyday life.
by
Abbot Christopher Jamison, O.S.B.
S
ilence is often considered awkward: Witness the embarrassed silence of people at a party not sure what to say next, or of a group of strangers stuck in an elevator. These awkward silences disturb us. On the other hand there is a silence that consoles us: the silence of a sleeping
Abbot Christopher Jamison, O.S.B. was abbot of Worth Abbey in England during the filming of two British reality TV programs The Monastery and The Big Silence.
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child, the stillness of mountains, or the tranquility of a church.
Stop the noises in your head The challenge for people today is to find positive silence in the city, the setting in which most people now live. Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is to help people find positive silence inside themselves. In the quest for sanctuary people often find the biggest obstacles are inside themselves. These obstacles are of different kinds and at different levels, but the first one that people most commonly encounter is what we can
VISION 2012
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