Fr Timothy Ratcliffe, when he was the Master General of the Dominicans, gave a talk to the Benedictine Abbots' Congress (2000), in which he spoke of the monastic life in these terms:
I wish to claim that your monasteries disclose God not
because of what you do or say, but perhaps because
the monastic life has, at its centre, a space, a void in which
God may show Himself. I wish to suggest that the rule of
St Benedict offers a sort of hollow centre to your lives,
in which God may live and be glimpsed.
The glory of God always shows itself in an empty space.
When the Israelites came out of the desert, God came with
them seated in the space between the wings of the
cherubim, above the seat of mercy. . . . [The cross] is a
throne of glory which is also a void, an absence, as a man
dies crying out for the God who seems to have deserted
him. The ultimate throne of glory is an empty tomb, where
there is no body. (Ibid., p. 100)
I will suggest three aspects of the monastic life which open
[a void, an empty space in your lives,] a space for God.
First of all, your lives are for no particular purpose. Secondly,
. . . they lead nowhere, and finally . . . they are lives of
humility.
A monastery, he says is a space in which God can dwell among men. All of us have an empty space inside, waiting to be filled, at our invitation, by God. But we do not like voids, and we cannot wait for God to fill it. We fill it ourselves with all kinds of nonsense. Monks and nuns face the void and wait on God. They seek the "one thing necessary". Those who seek find, and thus the void is filled with God and our emptynness becomes the place where we can meet God. . The tangible result is that monasteriess are places where you can experience something of the peace that the world cannot give.
This is a place where people are invited to think the unthinkable. Is God calling me to be a monk? Can I make room for God in this secular age simply by humbly seeking him? Can I, by God's grace, live the the vocation of St John the Baptist by diminishing and becoming less and less so that Christ can become more and more in a world that needs him so badly?
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