Silence

"In order to spiritualize our lives and make them pleasing to God, we must become quiet. The peace of a soul that is detached from all things and from itself is the sign that our sacrifice is truly acceptable to God." —Thomas Merton


There seems to be a lot of noise that pounds incessantly throughout the rhythmic comings and goings of the day-to-day. The sounds continue their relentless march into the forefront of my consciousness and leave me feeling, ironically, quite deaf to what really matters. These things, relationships, obligations and duties that are calling and beckoning us seek to inordinately attach to us. Sometimes I fall prey to these inordinate attachments and can feel myself running ragged just because of all the noise that is demanding my attention.


The thing is, this demand for my attention is sometimes from things that are superfluously present in my life.


The consistent run through a day has been: wake up, eat breakfast, listen to my wife watch netflix, brush my teeth, go to work, listen to all the church politics, come home, watch more netflix, cook dinner, play a videogame and go to bed.


Woof.


I have come to realize the absolute need in my life for silence, not a desire, but a true need. When your office is shared with someone and you have to keep up constant conversation, when your life is full of meaningless hours wasted watching netflix, when you are going through the motions and wonder why you feel so desensitized and indifferent, it's hard to see what needs to come first. It has only been recently that I've re-discovered my intimate, desperate need for silence.


In order to truly make all of the sacrifices and offerings we have in any given day pleasing to God, there must be a place of silence. There has to be a space made for the quiet of our hearts to reign and allow God to meet us and free us there. If there is no silence, there can be no peace. The great thing is, silence by it's very nature, I have found, can be a sort of sacramental calling us to reflect on the divine.


Recently, I was reading a fiction novel and having some quiet time. As I was following the story of the protagonist and getting an insight into the processes of the character's mind, I began to contemplate my own response to a particular moral dilemma presented in the book. That turned into a deeply profound experience wherein I began to pray about the nature of the good and how to better incorporate that within my own life. All from reading a fiction novel in silence.


The world is so loud, and is so desperate to suck us into that vortex of unending noise. The noise, to me, signifies a lack of something substantial, a lack of depth. It is only in silence that we come to dive into the mystery of the Divine and come out with a little bigger capacity to appreciate it every time.

Justice

Since when is being a Christian give everyone else the right to assume we are door mats? Simpletons to be walked over, trampled upon and dismissed? Since when is justice something that Christians are not supposed to advocate for? You cannot have forgiveness and mercy without presupposing the need for justice. Too often Christianity is associated with passivity. "Sit down, shut up. We do not want to hear from you, we do not want to be admonished," cries of a relativistic and demoralized people. Their indifference cries out to the heavens to be reckoned with and we would be amiss to not admonish the sinner, especially those closest to us. Trying to push the "nice Christian" persona is trying to eviscerate the gospel. Jesus did not die the shameful death of the cross for being nice. The apostles were not passive, indifferent and ashamed to proclaim the truth regardless of the repercussions in their own lives. Christianity is such a tour-de-force specifically because it is such a threat. It threatens our comfort, our relativism, our very selfish ways of thinking and acting. You cannot be a Christian and be silent in the face of such amazing arrogance and vitriol. Stand up! Fight! Do not be ashamed! Many Christians have gone to their deaths in the public square, who am I to refuse to go to my own death in the square of public opinion?

Frail

It has been well over a year since my last appearance on this blog, the circumstances of my life have changed dramatically, and yet, at the same time they have not. I have become a better person, and yet, at the same time I have become a worse person. My heart is heavy and weak and cold and... frail. The nights seem to haunt me with questions formed in the very center of by being. Questions that shake me to my core and further illustrate just how fragile and broken I am. Questions like:

Is my faith truly living?

Am I capable of loving anything or anyone beside myself?

When will my soul find rest?

The days, as providence would have it, do not seem to bode much better. Every day I return to a church that simply drains me. I can feel myself becoming more distant, more indifferent, more angry. I recognize my ultimate inability to change anything, the cogs in the machinations of jaded ministry continue to turn without a moment to consider anything other than its own foreordained drudgery that slowly buries it into its own sepulcher. 

Hours blend seamlessly into days. Days blur into weeks. Weeks fade rapidly into months. I cannot escape this foreboding sense that there is simply something that I am missing. Something that is not currently holding sway over my heart, mind and soul. Where is God?

The other day I was just sitting and thinking about all of the good things I have in my life. A wonderful woman, a regular paycheck and a better community. All of it though seemed like straw as I began to feel that creeping doubt call to me, "Where is God?" I am so frail, and I am so weak, and I fear that staying in ministry will only further continue the destruction of my faith. I want a heart back that gives everything to God. I want to just give up control but, from where I sit and looking ahead, I am much afraid. God has become a business associate alone in only a few short years. The hypocrisy is not lost on me, in fact, it compounds my guilt and feelings of emptiness. 

So, I sit here, typing into a blog that has not seen any interaction in a long while, and I cannot help but feel like God as well has not interacted with me in a long while. I am owing up to my brokenness, and once more, I invite God into my frailty.