Daily Reading for April 23
In the silence, we are being prepared for this awakening which is an encounter with the fullness and the splendour of Jesus in that fully awakened state to which the Resurrection led Him, because no one comes to the Father of all except through the Son in whom all creation comes into being. But even if we know intellectually that this is the purpose of the silence, at the time our actual experience is of the void. . . . The Christian carries this dying within him as he goes about his daily routine, not in a self-dramatizing or self-obsessed way, but with a joyful awareness that more and more deeply suffuses his whole being, that the degree to which he dies to himself in this void is the degree to which he is revivified in the transcendent life of the completely free man, Jesus. . . .
As the Christian enters into the cycles of death and resurrection more thoroughly, he becomes more aware of its universal truth, that it is the model of all being. He begins to appreciate what Mystery is. In order to become fully opened to the force of this universal cycle, we need to understand that it is completed at every level of every life, and in all of the countless ways in which we can examine or apprehend the meaning of our own life.
From Word into Silence by John Main OSB (New York: Paulist Press, 1981).