As you might know, I’ve been working on a series for my Substack paywall subscribers exploring silence through evocative photography and prose. Today, I released Silence, Episode 2. This is for paying members only, but I’m sharing an excerpt with you today. If you want to read the entire piece, subscribe here.

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9. The Fuga Mundi

In his book, The Power of Silence, Cardinal Robert Sarah describes how a cloister (perhaps even a governor-imposed cloister) provides for the fuga mundi, or the “flight from the world to find solitude and silence.” Of the fuga mundi, he writes:

“It means the end of the turmoil, the artificial lights, the sad drugs of noise and the hankering to possess more and more goods, so as to look at heaven. A man who enters the monastery seeks silence in order to find God. He wants to love God above all else, as his sole good and his only wealth.”

There have always been cloisters, places to flee from the world—monasteries, cathedrals, nature herself. I have loved these cloisters when I have chosen them. When they have chosen me, I’ve loved them less.

We are in a season of cloistering, though it might be less of a flight and more of a divine pulling from the world. Still, there is a gift waiting in the silence: The God who is our sole good, our only wealth.