Hear Our Silence: A Portrait of the Carthusians - Softcover

'A Portrait of the Carthusians'

For a short period one summer, John Skinner stayed at the English Carthusian monastery at Parkminster in Sussex. The Carthusians are said to be the toughest monastic order in Christendom. John Skinner had tried a religious vocation himself with the Jesuits, but left as a young man for the world of commerce and marriage.

Parkminster houses twenty monks from all over the world but was designed for three times that number. Dilapidated as it is, English Heritage believes it to be the finest example of a monastery working to a medieval pattern anywhere in the United Kingdom.

Despite the monks' fascinating cosmopolitan backgrounds, John Skinner found their 900-year-old lifestyle to be little disturbed by the twentieth century. Each lives as a hermit, meeting the others in church for two of the eight offices and Eucharist, but otherwise eating, working and praying alone. His first concern is to confront God. Once in His Presence, then prayer for and about the world flows as a matter of course.

As Skinner forces himself out of bed at midnight for three hours of prayer, he enters an ancient pattern of worship which unites members of religious orders worldwide. In his own words: "Here I found something rare and special, a core desire to perform each day's tasks, both work and prayer, as simply and as perfectly as possible."