Sister Wendy Beckett has assembled paintings reflecting the value of quiet contemplation in the section on silence in her Book of Meditations. In Rembrandt's portrait Woman with a Pink, silence is the way into the deep well of inner wisdom; the woman's attention is directed not at the flower she holds but on her own thoughts. The nourishing power of silence as part of the discipline of contemplative reading is depicted in Roger van der Weyden'sThe Magdalen Reading. And in Raphael's St. Catherine of Alexandria, we see the rapture that can come when our minds are stilled before God.

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