So, what are you giving up for Lent? It starts tomorrow, eh? It is the season for making room, either in your tummy so that God can fill you with Himself without all the richness of the earth filling it, or in your mind by clearing it away of distractions and clutter--so much of that in all of our lives, right?
I am giving up... well, this blog. Just for Lent, as far as I know! It's not that blogging is some terrible thing in my life or is causing me great problems spiritually. I enjoy the blog and have settled into a fairly manageable rhythm with it.
It is just that my real Lenten need this year is a simple one: I need more silence in my life. I know that people have an sort of funny picture of MH that it is a kind of lay monastery where all we do is pray in grand silence all day. It is not... quite like that, really.
My life is a busy one, full of people and obligations each day. I wouldn't have it any other way, and am quite content and peaceful in my vocation. But... I have been feeling the need for more silence, quite acutely, lately. And the simple truth is, the only place in my life I can put more silence in is the place currently taken up with blogging.
I will still blog on Sunday with the weekly round-up of life in MH. Sunday is not 'Lent' in the penitential sense of the word. And I will indeed (as far as I know...) be back at Easter time, continuing with all the series that I am (I admit) kind of abandoning in mid-stream right now.
Be assured of my prayers for you all (my blog and book readers are on my prayer list), and know especially that I pray you all have a Lent that is truly spiritually renewing and enriching. God bless you, and talk to you in April!
Showing posts with label silence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silence. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Friday, January 8, 2016
My Soul Waits in Silence
For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from him comes my salvation.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall never be shaken.
How long will you assail a person,
will you batter your victim, all of you,
as you would a leaning wall, a tottering fence?
Their only plan is to bring down a person of
prominence.
They take pleasure in falsehood;
they bless with their mouths, but inwardly they curse.
For God alone my soul waits in silence,
for my hope is from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
On God rests my deliverance and my honor;
my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.
Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us.
Those of low estate are but a breath,
those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balances they go up;
they are together lighter than a breath.
Put no confidence in extortion,
and set no vain hopes on robbery;
if riches increase, do not set your heart on them.
Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this:
that power belongs to God, and steadfast love belongs
to you, O Lord.
For you repay to all according to their work.
Psalm 62
Reflection – This week’s edition of the
Weekly Psalter delivers up to us this lovely little psalm of serene confidence
in God amidst the storms of life. The past section of the psalter has been
quite full of not-quite-so-serene reflections on these storms—lots of loud
cries of anguish, calls for vengeance, general rending of garments and so
forth.
Now, we are in a different place. Now, we
wait upon God in silence and peace. Now, God is already working some kind of
deliverance, some kind of mighty work of grace, for now the psalmist himself is
brought to a place of stillness and of faith.
And of course in this place of faith, our
whole perspective changes on who are the powerful and successful, who the lowly
and weak. We begin to see that the world’s views on these matters are not
particularly enlightening, not especially wise or insightful.
It seems to me that this psalm has a lot
to teach us about why it is so important to carve out some space for silence in
our lives, if it is at all possible. The mother or father in the midst of
raising a lot of children is probably not going to find too much of that, but
we’re not all in that mode, are we? And yet it is such a cultural norm to
constantly surround ourselves with noise and activity and fuss and bother.
I think the lack of silence in our world
today is one of the great schemes of the Enemy to deprive men and women of the
knowledge of God. Without silence it is very hard to come to that place of
refuge, that rock. It is hard to recognize the very silly lies and foolishness
of worldly ‘wisdom’, hard to see through the posturings and vain boasts of the
powerful of this world.
The truth is, they are so much less than
they make themselves out to be. God is so much more than we realize Him to be.
There is so much more goodness than evil, so much more light than darkness, so
much more love than hate in the universe that if we step aside from the
constant stream of information and mis-information, verbal and visual stimuli
that bombard us, it really doesn’t take all that long to realize it.
So I do encourage all of us to look for, find, and make that space for silence in our lives. To turn off our devices and turn to the Lord in contemplation and prayer. To look for Him, and looking for Him, look a bit less to the values, standards, measures of worldly wealth and power. They really don’t matter; truly, they don’t. He matters, and the true measure of life, which is the measure of our charity, our love, matters. And that’s all that matters.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Why People Are Nervous
Today it seems as though language
had been robbed of its forgetfulness: every word is present somewhere in the
general noise of words around us. In the general noise of words everything
emerges for a moment, only to disappear again. Everything is there at the same
time and yet not there at all.
There is no longer any present
immediacy of the word and therefore no forgetting. Forgetting is no longer done
by man directly but proceeds outside his control in the general noise of words
jostling one with another.
But that is not a forgetting at all,
but merely a disappearing. And so there is no forgiving either in the world
today; since now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it is always bound
to turn up again somewhere. And it is also a fact that one never really has a
word or a thing today—and that is why people are so nervous.
Max Picard, The World of Silence
Reflection
- I have
been working my way through this wonderful book, and periodically have shared
some of its nuggets on this blog. This one in particular seems almost eerily
prophetic—Max Picard invents the Internet! There are so many choice phrases
here that almost exactly describe the world of information today: ‘Everything
is there at the same time and yet not there at all… the general noise of words
jostling one with another... now one can never get rid of a word or a thing, it
is always bound to turn up again somewhere… that is why people are so nervous.’
Well, yes. And almost cliché to say these
things nowadays, but this book was written in 1948. To be both constantly
engulfed in words and yet at the same time never have them, to be both
incapable of forgetting (and hence forgiving) since the Internet is forever,
and yet at the same time incapable of remembering, since the rush of words continually
races past us (not forgotten, but disappearing)—this is Internet culture, 2015.
And it is unacceptable. Inhuman, and
hence incapable of aiding us to be made divine by God’s grace. The Word became
flesh and dwelt among us—language is meant to serve its divine purpose always
in the end of communion of persons, always towards becoming ‘flesh’ and making
our flesh, our concrete experience of life, a communion of love.
Language as a ceaseless flow of binary
information across a flat screen is the anti-Incarnation. Language as a roar of
verbiage, a clamor and clash of agendas, a fighting for a slight fleeting
flicker of attention from the mob, ultimately language as click-bait in the
service of generating advertising revenue—this is a perversion of what it is to
be. Language is degraded from a quest for truth and understanding ordered
towards communion and love to being, essentially, a sales pitch.
In this time of the Synod on the Family,
I am concerned to see that roar of language, that clamor and clash and base
sophistry of marketing and sales being used to ‘talk about’ (well, sort of)
that which is truly a sacred matter, a holy thing. Both the realities of sex,
marriage, and family life, but also the reality of the human person made in God’s
image, broken by sin but redeemed in Christ—this is the true subject matter of
the Synod.
There is a real profanation of the holy,
a desecration of God’s image, when the inchoate howl of Internet chatter and
punditry engulfs these conversations. I am not talking about the Synod itself—the
Pope has decided we need a synod to talk about these things, and I am praying
for that synod and doing my best to follow its actual deliberations.
It is the constant blah-blah-blah, the
hand wringing, the claxon sounding, the sounding of the alarum against ‘those
horrible modernists’ or ‘those horrible traditionalists’, against Kasper or
Erdo, Marx or Sarah, the calls to action, the ‘deep concerns and confusion’ of
this writer or that writer, the apocalyptic fears on that website or the
triumphalist yells on another—all of this is more than divisive and
distasteful.
It is sacrilegious. Yes, strong language
and so forth. I don’t care. Language is debased and in that debasing of
language, actual human beings are damaged, the path of salvation in Christ is
obscured, the way of truth and love in the world is made hard to find and
ultimately souls beloved of God are made to stumble and fall from that way. And
that is scandal, in the exact sense of the word.
So there is a Synod going on. Let us pray
for it. Let us address ourselves to our own call to live faithfully the
mysteries of family, love, and human sexuality according to our own vocations.
And let us otherwise be still and silent. I will not be blogging about the
Synod, for the reasons given in this blog post, nor will I be taking any
interest in the commentary on same in the media, social or otherwise. And I encourage
you to do the same.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Lest The Truth Be Too Hard
Without
truth language would be a general fog of words above the silence; without truth
it would collapse into an indistinct murmuring. It is truth that makes language
clear and firm. The line separating the
true from the false is the support that holds language back from falling. Truth
is the scaffolding that gives language an independent foothold over against
silence.
Language
becomes a world of its own, as we have said already; and language now has not
only a world behind it—the world of silence, but a world near at hand—the world
of truth.
The
word of truth must keep in rapport with silence, however, for without it truth
would be too harsh and too hard. It would then seem as though there were only
one single truth, since the austerity of the individual truth would suggest a
denial of the inter-relatedness of all truth. The essential point about truth
is that it all hangs together in an all-embracing context.
Max Picard, The World of Silence
Reflection – I began discussing this quote from Picard
yesterday, but found there was more to say about it than could fit into a
single blog post. Yesterday I focused on the first two paragraphs, highlighting
the necessary relationship of ‘language’ and ‘truth’, and how the loss of that
connection, rather than liberating us to be tolerant and inclusive, actually
reduces all communication to the base level of naked power struggle and
manipulation.
The
other side of this, though, is this final paragraph, where Picard emphasizes
once again the role of silence in our lives, this time as a necessary
counterbalance to the passion for truth and its expression.
For
me, this means we need to listen deeply to one another. In the clamorous world
of competing ideologies, political and social agendae, and world building
projects of all kinds, we need all the more to seek out and embrace ‘the world
of silence’, the world where I am not simply trumpeting my views to the world
via social media or whatever other platform or pulpit I have, but where I in
turn actively listen to that which is not me, that which is other from me.
Not
simply so I can spot the weaknesses and fallacies of this other and tear it
down with relish, but so that I hear the truth that, indeed, the other has to
offer, even if I do disagree with them on the vital point.
This
is not mushy moral relativism. I will never seriously consider that I may be
wrong on the subject of, say, abortion, or contraception for that matter, or
the nature of marriage, or the absolute obligation to care for the poor, or any
one of a dozen other matters. For that matter, I am quite certain of the truth
of who Jesus is, what the path of eternal life is, the nature of the Church and
its necessity for salvation, and so forth. But because I have such opinions and
hold them most strongly, believing them to be not simply ‘my own ideas’ but the
Truth about Reality—all the more do I need to really listen to those who reject
those truths and have other ideas about things.
Truth
needs to be balanced by silence, humility, listening, or it devolves quickly
into a harsh and hard doctrinarianism. Listening applies not only to listening
to another person, although it is that for sure, but listening to the silence
of the world, to one’s own heart, to the voice of God, ultimately, shrouded in
mystery as that is.
Without
this commitment to listening, the words we speak and the truths we advance are
doomed to be unpersuasive and fall on deaf ears. Furthermore, even if we are in
fact ‘right’ about various matters, the refusal/inability to listen, to have
silence as the necessary counterbalance to our speech, dooms us to fall into
the trap of arrogance, anger, pride, and a half-dozen other related vices.
Being right can become more important that loving our neighbour, and that is a
grim mistake indeed.
Language,
truth, and silence together yield a very deep humility, a commitment to truth
that does not make us into Pharisees or inquisitors or bullies, a commitment to
silence and contemplation that is not a retreat into self-absorption and
complacency, a commitment to speech and communication that is not merely a parade
ground for the ego. And this is more and more the urgent call of our times,
when all of the above is all too common. The world is full of people blaring
their views at top volume and shredding everyone who disagrees with them with
savage ferocity. Picard’s little book on silence and speech offers deep wisdom
to offset this most modern mess, and we do well to heed him in this matter..
Monday, August 10, 2015
More Than A Nice Fridge Magnet
God is our
refuge and strength,
a very
present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth
gives way,
though the
mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the
mountains tremble at its swelling.
There is a
river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy
habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be
moved;
God will
help her when morning dawns.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
he utters
his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of
Jacob is our fortress.
Come, behold
the works of the Lord,
how he has
brought desolations on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks
the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be
exalted in the earth!”
The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of
Jacob is our fortress.
Psalm 46
Reflection – Sorry for my sudden lapse
into ‘blog silence’ these past days– combination of busyness and fatigue, I’m
afraid. Today’s psalm is one of the most beautiful in the whole psalter. In
particular, the ‘Be still and know that I am God’ is, after ‘The Lord is my
shepherd…’ one of the most quoted psalm verses, showing up on fridge magnets,
bookmarks, and the like.
There is so
little stillness in our world today. And so little knowledge of God. I wonder
if the two are connected. We are an ADHD culture, flitting about from thing to
thing, noise to noise, distraction here, diversion there. Taken up with
whatever the latest scandal or outrage or titillation, be it Cecil the Lion or
Caitlin Jenner or (ugh) Donald Trump.
So much
noise to so little effect. So much fuss, fuss, fuss. So little stillness. And…
so little knowledge of God. I can’t prove it, but I think it’s no coincidence
that the rise of irreligion and atheism has pretty much tracked with the level
of technological intrusion and ceaseless chatter in our world.
God is found
in the depths of our hearts. The depths of our hearts are not available to us
if we are constantly barraged or barraging ourselves with noise. The illiterate
peasant of the Middle Ages had a deeper interior life than the college graduate
of the 21st century, simply because his life was lived in a great
silence surrounded by the mysteries and beauty of God’s creation.
There is
little stillness, little knowledge of God, and so a great spirit of folly in
our world today. Whether it is people so married to the absolute need for
sexual autonomy that they will not admit that abortion ends a human life and so
is not a Good Thing, or people so… well, I’m not sure what exactly, but so
something or other that they are seriously considering electing a blowhard
buffoon with a bad haircut and a filthy mouth president of the most powerful
country on earth (and that’s all I will have to say on that subject), there is some terrible famine of wisdom, of basic
attentiveness to truth, that bespeaks of a deep loss of interiority, of
stillness, and of knowledge of God.
Psalm 46 is
a needful psalm, not just a nice little fridge magnet, but a clarion call to
change our way of life. If we continue to surround ourselves with noise and
clamor and frivolous trivialities, borne along by whatever the zeitgeist dishes
up each day, then we will continue to lack the most fundamental reflectiveness,
wisdom, and essential seriousness of mind needed of adult human beings in this
world.
God is real,
God is a refuge and strength, God is our very present help in distress… but we
need to be still to know this and act accordingly. Let us try to do so today—the
world needs it, and we need it.
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