“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.” ―Carthusian Monks

Profession, whether simple or solemn, cannot be an end in an absolute sense.  It is an end with regard to the past, it is a point of departure with regard to the future.  And Paul insists on saying that we must be straining forward to what lies ahead.  Th road that lies behind is to be forgotten: no more useless regrets, no more ‘if onlys’, no complacency about the spiritual riches we have accumulated.

In the presence of God, we are always unworthy servants, forgiven sinners, poor men.  We are not to close our hands on empty space, but keep them open towards the Lord in order to receive the generosity of his love.  We are sons and daughters to the extent which we are born of God; and we are born naked.

The power of forgetting is very important.  It allows us to free ourselves of resentments and marks of honor, of defilements and external burdens from our past; in order to keep only what is inscribed in the essence of our beings, through which we are what we are now.  Thus unburdened, we can run forward, agile and unattached, straining with all our efforts towards our end, in a manner that leaves all attainments behind, without ever pausing in this life: ‘Draw me after you, let us make haste’ (Song of Songs 1:4).  Christ is always ahead of us.  Union with God comes to us as a perpetual novelty, a beginning ever renewed.  Supported as we are by the ladder that links earth to heaven, which Jacob saw, God calls us to ascend to him. The ladder is Christ, and each rung always leads to another above it.  We are constantly at the beginning in respect to what is above us.  ‘The Wound of Love’ A. Carthusian Miscellany

Neither fear nor love of self can turn the soul to God; they may sometimes change the aspect or influence the actions of a man, but they will never change his heart.  Even the slave sometimes does God’s work, but because he does not do it willingly he proves that his heart is still hard.  And the hireling too will sometimes od God’s work, but because he only does it for reward, it is clear that he is only attracted by his greed.  Where there is self-seeking, there to is self-esteem; where there is self-esteem, there too is private interest; and where private interest makes a corner for itself there rust and filth will collect.  Let fear itself be the law of a slave, by it he is bound; let greed be for the hireling his law, by it he also is confined when by it he is led off and enticed away.  Neither of these two laws is unspotted, neither can turn the soul to God; only charity can do this, because she alone can make a soul disinterested.  –St Bernard of Clairvaux in a letter to Guigo I, 5^th Prior of La Grande Chartreuse

He (Guigo, the fifth Prior of the Carthusians) begins by riveting your mind to the thought of sheer Truth. “Without form or comeliness, and fastened to a cross, Truth is to be worshiped.”

“The poverty of thine own inner vision of God, blind as thou art, for He is ever there, makes thee willing to go out of doors from thine own hearth, refusing to linger within thyself, as being in the dark. So thou hast nothing to do but go out gaping after external forms of bodies and the opinions of men. May God be merciful to thee, that the feet of thy mind may find no resting-place, so that somehow, O soul, thou mayest, like the dove, return unto the Ark”

–‘Upon God’s Holy Hills: I. the Guides of St Anthony of Egypt, St Bruno of Cologne, St John of the Cross’ C.C. Martindale

We must never install ourselves in anything whatever, except in God alone.  Love requires it and spiritual poverty must go that far.  Acts of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love reach God as he is in himself, and not just as partially refracted in the concepts of faith.  Yet this is only true if one surrenders to their dynamism of love that plunges into the unknown depths of the Mystery and leaps up toward the One who remains hidden behind the wall.  The life of prayer involves an endless transcending, a refusal to settle down, a thirst for the infinite, which shatter, one after the other, the pious and reassuring idols that we tirelessly construct, one after the other.  That is the desert.  –‘The Wound of Love’ A. Carthusian Miscellany

All that is good (religious life): it is the fruit of his faith, his prayer, the fulfillment of the promise, the divine blessing, it is ‘Issac’ (a willing sacrifice through blind faith). He (the monk) has to use the human resources that God provides for him; to neglect to do so would often be the presumption that ‘tempts God’. But the sort of security that means afford him, the light and warmth they bring, could also turn them into screens against a light and warmth infinitely more subtle, beyond man’s grasp. Against a lack of support infinitely stronger than the little righteousness according to man’s measure that he painstakingly seeks to build, and behind which he runs the risk of settling down, sheltered against the far more exacting demands of this God who knows no measure. One is so at home among things, ideas, rules, and ceremonies; there, one is master! One pays the tithe of adoration to God, but one takes good care that the doors which might allow Go himself to enter are kept securely closed.

But the years go by, and before the monk’s eyes the horizon constantly recedes…..the monk is humble free from illusion. The sand of life which he holds in his hand is flowing rapidly through his fingers; he has difficulty in seeing beyond the limits of human horizons; he knows his poverty, his human frailty, his human heart. He is unsure if he still really believes in what he is unable to see. Ritual and ceremonial have little to say to him; the repetition of acts, to which no interior spontaneity corresponds, tends to produce a certain alienation of his personality. The well-organized structures of his life hedge him in like prison bars where all seems sterile and dead. His contact with his brethren is purely external, as that of a passer-by; he feels isolated, a stranger.

This means that God is taking Issac back and the monk must surrender freely what appears from a human point of view to be the indispensable means of the realization of the promise, of the Kingdom of God—that which seemed to be the Kingdom—and this he must do without hesitation, without abandoning the quest of the Absolute, of the love that now seems to be falling to pieces and illusion. He must hold fast in faith and hope to the Word of God and the promise of Christ, to the power of the Spirit of God alone. That is the courage proper to faith: the courage to believe that one receives—and to receive in fact already—all, absolutely all, from the sheer bounty of God’s love. –‘The Wound’s of Love’ A. Carthusian Miscellany

Stanley Roseman, a respected American artist capturing the monastic life.