Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘The Habit of Perfection’, of which this is the first stanza, appears to speak of renunciation. Hopkins works his way through the senses, and urges restraint upon himself in the use of each one. This impression is amplified by Evelyn Waugh having used the phrase Elected Silence as the title of the UK edition of Thomas Merton’s autobiography (called in the USA The Seven-Storey Mountain), which describes how Merton turned his back on a busy New York life to become a Trappist monk. This is silence as giving up, a setting aside of what is perceived to be the normal state of noise and motion. Ignatius of Loyola was wary of his closest followers being tempted too much by this kind of stillness. It is true that he wanted them to be contemplatives; but, essentially, they were to be contemplatives in action, often immersed in the bustle and movement of city life. The spiritual path that he developed is designed to feed such engagement. It finds a place for a chosen silence, but uses it to draw on resources that can then be brought into apostolic engagement. This issue of The Way traces some of the ways in which this process operates.
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