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.