Good morning…
“Silence guards the inner heat,” writes Nouwen on page 45 in The Way of the Heart. “This inner heat is the life of the Holy Spirit within us. Thus, silence is the discipline by which the inner fire of God is tended and kept alive.”
Nouwen continues: “Diadochus of Photiki offers us a concrete image: ‘When the door to the steambath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good. Thereafter the intellect, though lacking appropriate ideas, pours out a welter of confused thoughts to anyone it meets, as it no longer has the Holy Spirit to keep its understanding free from fantasy. Ideas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy. Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts.”
“These words of Diadochus go against the grain of our contemporary lifestyle, in which ‘sharing’ has become one of the greatest virtues,” concludes Nouwen. “We have been made to believe that feelings, emotions, and even the inner stirrings of our soul have to be shared with others… the door of our steambath is open most of the time.”
I walk away from these quotes with a simple instruction to myself, “As often as possible, ‘Keep the sauna door closed,’ so that the heat of the Holy Spirit can build up steam and do God’s transformative work within my soul.”
“Keep the sauna door closed.”
…Sue…
