“In the solitude and silence of the wilderness, for their labour in the contest, God gives His athletes the reward they desire: a peace that the world does not know and joy in the Holy Spirit.” — St. Bruno von Köln, Founder of the Carthusian order.

A deeper insight into souls gradually allows us to discover that behind possibly disappointing exteriors often lie real treasures of interior life, of generosity, and of an authentic search for God. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that these precious gems are often buried in unattractive dress. How could it be otherwise, face to face with the Absolute? Is this not the price of such dangerous proximity to fire? For it highlights all our faults, all our roughness of character and all the petty misery which in other circumstances would be swallowed up in the surrounding sea of trivialities. To wish to come face to face with the light of God is deliberately to consent to expose all our faults and pettiness to the hard light of day. These first become apparent to others, and then, as we become enlightened, to ourselves. We first discover mediocrity in others and afterwards, in ourselves.

Risks are always involved when our aim is high. Seeing our-selves apparently ever more distant and removed from our goal is a painful suffering. On a more prosaic level, this mediocrity is the consequence of our separation from the world. To the extent that solitude is effective, it deprives us of a great many advantages which might introduce into the community an élan or a renewal which would mask the mediocrity or remedy it in some way. The critical choice must be made: either choose God and accept that perfection must come first and foremost from within, or leave open certain gates to the world so that certain means, other than those proper to the desert, play a part in one’s life. The usual choice in the Charterhouse is the former. To make such a decision quite deliberately represents a very real sacrifice — an entry into solitude at a very exacting price. In effect, it is a conscious decision to leave untapped a part of our human potential so that God may well up from within. Such conditions are only suitable for those who have already attained a certain level of human maturity and self-motivation in their spiritual and intellectual life.

The discovery of mediocrity first in others and then in oneself is a step towards an even more disconcerting discovery. Holiness, perfection and virtue — all these qualities which, without realizing it, we believed to be reflections of the Absolute within ourselves — begin to vanish. Everything which tends to make the ego a point of reference or an autonomous centre must disappear in order to conform with the resurrected Christ who is but pure relation to the Father. Even his humanity is now endowed with divine names. All created riches have been stripped away in order to be nothing but pure relation.

Such is the direction which the monk must take little by little: first, in his interior life and then in all his activities, whether in cell or in community. He must learn never to focus on himself but to be taken up in the movement of a divine love which has neither beginning nor end, neither goal nor source, neither limit nor shape. He must surrender to the breath of the Spirit, without knowing whence he comes nor whither he goes. —Meditation on the Carthusian Vocation. Transfiguration Chartreux.

A Charterhouse couples in a quite inseparable manner both the heady prescriptions for union with God and a brutal rupture from what in traditional monastic language is called `the world’. Despite certain misrepresentations, there is nothing in this of Manichaeism, pessimism or contempt for those who are part of `the world’. The world is the whole of humanity engaged in the splendid enterprise of co-operating with the action of the Creator. It is man tending towards God across the whole spectrum of his creation. It is religious man who reflects the face of God in Christ through a thousand forms of apostolate.

All of this is good and all reflects God; but none of it is God. Choosing God consequently implies a separation from every-thing that is not God without even considering all that is involved, and we would not dream of compromising on its exigencies. Even the most wonderful of his creations is nothing compared with him and he it is whom we seek.

http://transfiguration.chartreux.org

According to Guigo, Hugh kept strict custody of the eyes and the senses in general; he practiced poverty and was pious. His continual prayers, fasts, and vigils made him a true contemplative, a man who had an experiential knowledge of God and who had received the gift of tears, which at his time was considered as the summit of the spiritual life. Hugh shed tears of contrition and of thanksgiving, especially in periods of sickness, a trial which began very early in his life and conformed him to the suffering Christ. Little by little he became senile and lost his memory almost completely, except concerning the things of God (prayers), which he remembered perfectly until his last day. –‘A Dwelling Place of God; Saint Bruno, and Saint Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, Founder and Co-Founder of the Carthusian Order’ Charterhouse of the Transfiguration

“If the bow is stretched for too long, it becomes slack and unfit for its purpose.”

“The cross is steady while the world is turning.”

“The ambiance of solitude, the absence of any disturbing noise and of worldly desires and images, the quiet and calm attention of the mind to God, helped by prayer and leisurely reading, flow into that “quies” or “rest” of the soul in God. A simple and joyful rest, full of God, that leads the monk to feel, in some way, the beauty of eternal life.”

St Bruno quotes

The value of work with respect to prayer depends very much on the attitude we bring to it.  Work is a human reality willed by God, and has intrinsic value, if we accomplish it with all good will.  Apart from the intention with which we do it, it has been explicitly willed for us by the Lord: ‘The Lord God took man and set him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it’ (Genesis 2:15).  We have to acknowledge, however, that in certain cases the work, if it is done conscientiously, is not compatible with prayer, or that the actual dispositions of the monk make it impossible for his work to be effectively a prayer.  Prayer and work will then be juxtaposed, and not directly related.

We can be faced with several possibilities:
–work is an aid to prayer,
–work seems to be neutral in regards to prayer,
–work is actually an obstacle to prayer.

‘The Wound of Love’ A. Carthusian

If we are to pray with the necessary fervor and purity, the following discipline must be carefully observed.  First, you must completely surpass all the anxieties of the flesh…renounce all unkind and empty talk, gossip and clowning.  Above all, you must entirely expel the emotions of anger and sadness; you must uproot the noxious seedings of sensual desire and the spirit of possessiveness.  All such vices, that are visible even to our fellow men, must be cut away and destroyed.  But after this preliminary work of purification has received its crown of innocent simplicity and purity, the foundations must be laid; unshakable foundations of a deep humility, capable of bearing the tower that is to rise even to the heavens… –St John Cassian ‘Conferences’ quoted in ‘The Wound of Love’ by A. Carthusian.