Jan 9 Tue
Quotes from Robert Cardinal Sarah (1). He wrote in the “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise" (Ignatius Press) with Nicolas Diat in 2016:
“Man must make a choice: God or nothing, silence or noise.” (67)
“Prayer consists of listening to God speaking silently within us.” (52)
“Sacred silence, laden with the adored presence, opens the way to prayerful silence, full of loving intimacy.” (122)
“God is truly present in the prayerful heart. This human heart is God’s abode, the temple of silence… God the Father waits for his children in their own hearts.” (23)
“Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder, and kneeling before God.” (56)
“Nestling in silence against the heart of God, with the open Bible over our head like the wings of the Holy Spirit, is still the best antidote, the one thing necessary to chase away from our interior territory all that is useless, superfluous, worldly, and even our own self.” (74)
“Without silence, without prayer God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” (80)
“Mother Teresa had a face charred by God’s silences, but she bore within her and breathed love. By dint of remaining long hours before the burning flame of the Blessed Sacrament, her face was tanned, transformed by a daily face-to-face encounter with the Lord.” (98)
“If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” (144)
“Silence is an acoustic veil that protects the mystery… a sort of sonic iconostasis.” (124, 136)
“Relativism is a widespread evil, and it is not easy to combat it. The task becomes more complex inasmuch as it arbitrarily serves as a sort of charter for a way of communal life. Relativism attempts to complete the process of the social disappearance of God. It guides mankind with an attractive logic that proves to be a perverse totalitarian system.”
“True freedom lies in the battle to agree with God the Father’s will, and to correspond to it.”
“Simplicity, confidence, self-abandonment in God’s hands: that is our path to God. Christian life is a conspiracy of charity.”
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