Silence

 

Often, it seems to me, that as human beings, we fight against the very things in life that are the most valuable gifts to us or the best roads for us to walk on.

 

We may always want our lives to be different, always wanting something we do not have, but that old wise saying, “God knows best..”  It can be said in such a way that it can sound patronizing and I can feel angry about that, but really and truly, God does!

 

My life has been plunged into a solitude, loneliness (if you will) and silence, that I would have never chosen for myself.

In fact, in earlier years, I would have done everything I could have to run away from this interior solitude, and I would have tried to avoid such inner silence.

 

To be busy, productive, and to do something worthwhile, to keep one’s life filled with activity, or noise, as the case may go, that was the way I operated.  Somehow I just bought into the culture of our day which says that in order to be valuable, even in God’s service, one must do and do and do.  Being was just like wasting a life, and I could not see how, in good conscience, I could do that, when people were suffering and dying all around me!

 

There comes a time in everyone’s life, when they just lose the ability to keep this pace of “noise” going, because they might get sick, or become immobilized to one degree or another and that causes them to have to slow down, or even stop!  They have to stop and listen to their inner souls, and to the God within who speaks within their depths.

 

Silence, for me, is like the walls of an enclosure; it is like living in a cloister, where there is just God and me.

I can hear God’s voice!

I do not try to escape it anymore.

I can be healed by silence, because there is no poison coming into this safe place interiorly, which can corrupt God’s loving presence and healing, and tamper or obscure His all-consuming loving light.

I want to plunge into this silence and solitude which has been given to me as a great gift.  In this place, I can commune with God and bring the world’s hungry and wounded!  I can fight with a sword against the evils that ravage the world, because it is in this desert silence where I meet God!

 

Sometimes, in our culture, people keep the television on so that they just do not have to face the silence.

What are they afraid of?

Facing themselves?  There God?