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# Prayer and the Benedictine Life - A Time to Keep Silence
- URL: https://joshualore.com/inthemiddleway/prayer-and-the-benedictine-life-a-time-to-keep/
- Published: 2015-10-28T18:25:02.000Z
- Updated: 2015-10-28T18:25:02.000Z
- Author: Joshua Lore
- Tags: Uncategorized, #Migrated-1788408094757, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-09-03 00:01

![image](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ba4ac5a32394147a0cad3cc3ceb8e957/tumblr_inline_nwy0offnyA1r1j2it_540.jpg)

Patrick Leigh Fermor on prayer and the Benedictine life at the Abbey St. Wandrille:

> “The dominating factor of monastic existence is a belief in the necessity and efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle  
>  
> — a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought  
>  
> — to the monks who practice it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism….However strange these values may appear to the *homme moyen sensuel*, such are the pursuits that absorb much of a monk’s life. They range from a repetition of the simpler prayers, sometimes tallied by the movement of beads through the fingers, to an advanced intellectual skill in devotion and meditation; and occasionally rise to those hazardous mystical journeys of the soul which culminate, at the end of the purgative and illuminative periods, in blinding moments of union with God; experiences which the poverty of language compels the mystics who experience them directly to describe in the terminology of profane love: a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which, since Donne, Quarles, Hubert, Vaughan and Traherne wrote their poems, has drained away from life in England. With this daily, unflagging stream of worship, a volume of prayer ascends, of which, if it is efficacious, we are all the beneficiaries. Between people pledged to those spiritual allegiances, “Pray for me” and “Give me your blessing” are no polite formulae, but requests for definite, effective acts. And it is easy to imagine the value and fame, before the growth of scepticism, of men whose lives were spent hammering out in silent factories these imponderable but priceless benefits. They are the anonymous well-wishers who reduce the moral overdraft of mankind, *les paratonnerres* (as Huysmans says) *de la société*. Life, for a monk, is shorter than the flutter of an eyelid in comparison with eternity, and this fragment of time flits past in the worship of God, the salvation of his soul, and the humble intercession for the souls of his fellow exiles from felicity.  
>  
> “Their values have remained stable while those of the world have passed through kaleidoscopic changes. It is curious to hear, from the outside world in the throes of its yearly metamorphoses, cries of derision levelled at the monastic life. How shallow, whatever views may be held concerning the fundamental truth or fallacy of the Christian religion, are these accusations of hypocrisy, sloth, selfishness, and escapism! The life of monks passes in a state of white-hot conviction and striving to which there is never a holiday; and no living man, after all, is in a position to declare their premises true or false. They have foresworn the pleasures and rewards of a world whose values they consider meaningless; and they alone have as a body confronted the terrifying problem of eternity, abandoning everything to help their fellow-men and themselves to meet it.”   
>  
> —[***A Time to Keep Silence***](http://www.amazon.com/Time-Silence-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590172442?ref=joshualore.com)