SAINT GERTRUDE THE GREAT: ON SILENCE Taken from THE REVELATIONS OF ST. GERTRUDE NOTE: This brief presentation is paraphrased because the work is copyrighted. The law permits short passages to be cited. The portion we are concerned with is too long, so I condensed it to not violate the law or the rights of the publisher. In her work, REVELATIONS, Saint Gertrude the Great has a section titled, "Of refraining from useless words". She begins with citing from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 58, verse 13: "Thou dost not thine own ways, and thine own will is not found to speak a word." God gave her the grace to learn from this passage that he who regulates his words and actions with deliberate care, and abstains even from those that are licit when they are not necessary, will obtain a three-fold grace: 1. Greater pleasure in God --- "thou shalt be delighted in the Lord." 2. Bad thoughts will be less powerful an enemy --- "I will lift thee above the high places of the earth." 3. In Heaven Jesus Christ will communicate the merits of His most holy life more abundantly to such a Saint than He will to others, because by it the Saint has been victorious over every temptation, gaining glory --- "I will feed thee with the inheritance of Jacob thy father." God revealed to Saint Gertrude by these words from Isaiah 39: "behold, his reward is with him", that our Lord Himself, by His love, is the reward of the elect, and that He makes His abode in their souls with such sweetness, that they may truly say they are rewarded beyond all that they merited. When we are given to holy silence, abandoning ourselves completely to God and His Providence, with the intention of seeking only His will in all things, and accomplishing it, grace will have rendered us perfect already in the sight of God. As an adjunct or further fruit, St. Gertrude came to understand that those who repent promptly of their sins, as soon as they commit them, resolving with a contrite heart, a most sincere heart to keep the Commandments, are as truly sanctified and as promptly cured as the leper to whom our Lord said: "I will: be thou clean." E-MAIL HOME----------------PRAYERS AND DEVOTIONS www.catholictradition.org/Gertrude/saint-gertrude8.htm