Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
The Common Life
To live the ‘common life’ — alternating, like a breath, between resting in God’s stillness (fruition) and flowing out in active love and good works — so contemplation and action become one rhythm rather than rivals.
In 5 lines: Breathe in — rest in God in imageless stillness, simply enjoying His presence. Don’t cling to the sweetness. Breathe out — carry that stillness into the world as concrete love and good works. Let rest feed action and action feed rest, back and forth, like breathing. The goal isn’t withdrawal or busyness but both in harmony — the ordinary, shared “common life.”
What it is
Jan van Ruusbroec’s crowning teaching is the “common life” (ghemeyne leven) — his name for the fully mature spiritual life, in which contemplative rest and active love are not opposites but a single rhythm. His central image is breath: the mystic “inhales” by resting in God — sinking into a still, imageless fruition or enjoyment of the divine — and then “exhales” by flowing back out into the world in concrete love and good works, “with new eyes.” Crucially, neither pole is allowed to swallow the other: pure withdrawal would be incomplete, and pure activism would be shallow; the goal is to hold “enjoyment and activity” together “in perfect harmony,” each feeding the other.
Ruusbroec roots this in the Trinity itself, which (he says) eternally rests in unity and flows out in creative love — so the “common” (shared, ordinary, available-to-all) life mirrors God’s own life.
As a technique, then, it is a practice of rhythm: deliberately resting in stillness, and deliberately turning that stillness outward into love, back and forth. (The Inner Creates the Outer read both ways: attention rests inward in fruition, then turns outward in loving action.)
The Method
From The Spiritual Espousals and The Sparkling Stone (faithfully described, not reproduced):
- Rest in God (the inward breath). In stillness, let go of images, words, and striving, and sink into a quiet fruition — simply enjoying and reposing in God’s presence. Ruusbroec: “rest in Him whom one enjoys.” This is the contemplative pole, imageless and receptive.
- Don’t cling to the rest. Resist the temptation to make stillness the whole of the life or to hoard the sweetness of it. The rest is meant to overflow, not to be possessed.
- Flow out in love (the outward breath). Turn the stillness into concrete action — good works, service, love of neighbour — carrying the God you rested in into ordinary life and others. The mystic “exhales love into the world just as they inhale the spirit of God.”
- Let action feed rest, and rest feed action. Return from active love back into stillness, and from stillness back out into love, as a continuous alternation — like breathing — so each renews the other rather than competing.
- Aim at harmony, not balance-by-subtraction. The mature state is both at once — “enjoyment and activity” held together — not a compromise that waters down either. Ruusbroec calls this the highest life, higher than rest alone.
- Live it as “common.” Make it ordinary and shared: not a rarefied withdrawal but a way of being available, in everyday life, that any believer can grow into.
Source & Lineage
Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381) — “the Admirable Doctor” — was a Flemish priest and mystic who, after years in Brussels, founded the contemplative community at Groenendaal in the Sonian Forest.
Writing in vernacular Middle Dutch, his masterwork The Spiritual Espousals maps the active, interior, and contemplative (or “God-seeing”) lives, culminating in the common life that unites them.
He stands downstream of the apophatic tradition (Eckhart, the Rhineland mystics) yet correcting any quietist over-withdrawal, and he profoundly shaped the Devotio Moderna, Tauler, and later Low-Countries spirituality.
Common refinements
Camping in the rest. Treating contemplative stillness as the goal and neglecting active love is, for Ruusbroec, an incomplete spirituality — the rest is meant to overflow.
- All action, no rest. The opposite error: service and busyness with no return to stillness, which goes shallow and burns out. The breath must go both ways.
- Forcing a 50/50 balance. It’s a living rhythm, not an accountant’s split; some seasons breathe in more, some breathe out more. Aim at harmony, re-found continually.
- Clinging to consolations. Hoarding the sweetness of fruition is exactly what blocks the outflow; let the rest give itself away.