Silence Guards the Fire Within
This is the title from a section of Henri Nouwen’s book, The Way of the Heart. Here Nouwen posits that when we talk, we let out the fire of the Spirit and our soul becomes cold. The imagery is that the the fire of the Spirit resides in us, warming us, moving us, and when we open our mouths that fire escapes. If we leave our mouths open long enough the fire leaves and all we are able to speak are our own confused ramblings. He then quotes James Hannay who wrote The Wisdom of the Desert back in 1904 saying, “The man who talks about his religious feelings runs a great risk of dissipating them altogether. No man has more need to ‘guard the fire within’ than the preacher whose duty forces him to be for ever giving utterance to the most sacred feelings of his heart. I conceive that this is what the hermits meant by speaking of the mouth as the door of the heart. The mouth is not a door through which any evil enters. The ears are such doors, or the eyes. The mouth is a door only for exit. What was it that they feared to let go out? What was it which someone might steal out of their hearts, as a thief takes the steed from the stable when the door is left open? It can have been nothing else than the force of religious emotion within them. Words conveyed it to listeners, perhaps; they certainly took from the store within. Thus it was that the hermits not only avoided definite sins of the tongue, not only shrank, as many others do, from specially dangerous kinds of talk, but aimed at reducing to the narrow limits of what was absolutely necessary all talk, even talk about religion, and set up as an ideal a life of almost unbroken silence.” Perhaps we should also leave the silence of our hearts unbroken more often.-
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