One Sees Very Well From A Tower

The following, written to Poor Clare nuns about their life of enclosure, strikes me as applicable, also, to lives "enclosed in the will of God."

"There have been remarks for centuries past about people who dwell in ivory towers. We know what is meant when it is said in the way it is said. Exasperation. Condemnation. A certain contempt. That they are unaware of other persons.

I always thought that was a very strange figure of speech. For one thing, one sees very well from a tower, much better than when one is in the midst of a crowd. If you really want to see the needs of everyone, a tower would be a very good place to go for perspective.

And then I thought, 'ivory tower?' Well, what could give more joy to the poor who have so little than the sight of an ivory tower? How it would draw them! How it would make them surge toward it to investigate this beautiful thing.

So an ivory palace is a very beautiful place to dwell in - and that is your enclosure. Out of it must always come music, the music of Jesus. Then one is very pre-eminently doing God's work.

So always from your life of prayer, from the ivory palace of your enclosure, may God hear music, for from the heart of true payer comes stringed music to God and to the world. To all the grinding hatreds and frustrations of the world must come the stringed music of our enclosed life of prayer."

(Mother Mary Francis PCC, Walls Around the World, p. 22. Click here for information)

"From ivory palaces stringed instruments make you glad." (Psalm 45:9)