Catherine Coldstream
speaker
329 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Catherine Coldstream’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You knew exactly where you had to go when.
And you were silent most of the time and very focused on what you were doing.
So there were all these kind of external structures like the texts and the timetable and the bell and
that meant you could sort of focus on your inner life and not be always needing to talk or sort of make decisions.
Well, it was difficult, obviously.
But I think the key thing is that that part of me, and obviously a huge part of me, which was searching for expression or for something transcendent through the arts, that was the part of me that found a kind of freedom in the interior life.
So although the outward life for Carmelite is regulated and full of boundaries and borders and structures...
The silence and the solitude that facilitates is actually like a huge expanse of freedom in terms of your interior life.
So basically, we'd have two hours a day of completely silent prayer and times for reading.
And although our reading material was pretty restricted,
You could be as free as you liked in your prayer time.
And I think we focused on prayer, which sounds really uncool and really kind of weird to people, I guess, if they're not used to the idea.
But prayer was, I think, I approached it like an art form.
Well, not an art form, but I think I approached it like a philosophy.
For me, I wanted to plumb the depths of this kind of way of silent prayer because I felt...
you know, almost in a philosophical sense that this was the answer.
And so I didn't, I think I went in with a kind of quite intellectual attitude to it, thinking, you know, this will follow on for my interest in, you know, in transcendence through music or searching for the truth through reading.
I would be following the same sort of search, but through prayer.
But of course, once you get really deeply into it and you're in a very confined and restricted world,
And it's not all plain sailing, but I think that the prayer life was where we had freedom and a sort of sense of something really special going on on a personal level.
Showing 81–100 of 329 · page 5 of 17
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