Silence

Silence is good for the soul, essential to recollection, and conducive to humility. Remember Our Lord's silence throughout His life and during the hours of His passion.

Elizabeth Leseur           

I discovered Leseur's writing only recently and was struck by the simplicity of her spirituality. She begins a series of "retreats," each with a resolution, with Silence. She has a resolution for each of twelve months. The beginning of a new year struck me as a good time to consider them one by one.

When I see the word silence, I tend to think of it in terms of shutting out noise. Turn off the TV. Shut out the news.  Retreat to a spot where there is no sound. Avoid social media. Get off the Internet. Quiet your insides. Those are all things to do. That isn't what she means.

Leseur writes about being silent. Her emphasis is on not talking, and particularly about not talking about herself. For years I've grappled with something that skirts the edges of her thought but misses the heart of it. I have tended to focus on listening, being attentive to God and learning how to do that by learning to be attentive to Greg first of all and all others as well. My mantra has been listen don't talk in prayer, in social life, and in business. It's my mantra because I'm not very good at it. My natural instinct is to blurt out every thought.

How is that different from what Leseur writes? I realized that by focusing on listening I'm in expectation of receiving something. While it can and should open me up to compassion and care, it is in the end an openness to receiving, not giving. Leseur sees keeping silences as a value in and of itself; it is part of her great emphasis on humility, the emptying out of self. That wasn't a value to me in my twenties. As I age I see the emptying as the absolute necessity of the spiritual life and I know it for the virtually impossible challenge it is. 

So. Silence. She talks at length about all of the things about which she won't speak: the petty, the mean, the material, but also her own interior life, her spirituality and blessings granted her. She leaves it all between her and God. She does write about it so perhaps I can be excused for keeping this journal.

Her final resolution is, I resolve to hide my spiritual life, and, to great extent my sufferings, interests, and material or personal occupations under a veil of silence.

Wow. Perhaps I can take baby steps in that direction.

Plans

In his mind a man plans his course, but the LORD directs his steps.
Proverbs 16: 9

The old joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans. If you do a full-text search of the Bible on "plans" you get dozens of references to the plans of men, must of them about frustration. Rarely do you see that word in reference to God.

And in honor of the Feast of Christ the King, this from Pope Benedict XVI:

God does not have a fixed plan that he must carry out; on the contrary, he has many different ways of finding man and even of turning his wrong ways into right ways...the Feast of Christ the King is therefore not a feast of those who are subjugated, but a feast of those who know that they are in the hands of the one who writes straight with crooked lines.

So we plunge ahead confidently, remembering to listen, trying to do so, and trust Him to make sense out of the tangle of our lives.

Words

'Who gave a person a mouth?' Yahweh said to him... Is it not I, Yahweh? Now go, I shall help you speak and instruct you what to say.'
Exodus 4:11-12

God was very specific with Moses--where he was to go, what he was to say. Perhaps Moses just listened better. Perhaps it was the shepherding, and the time alone it gave him. Perhaps it was remembering to go up to the mountains, like Jesus did.

How do we listen? Where is the word?

Or perhaps, when you are the messenger, you just know.

Quaerere Deum

Oh that today you would listen to His word!
Psalm 95

Listen carefully, my son to the Master's instructions and attend to them with the ear of your heart.
Rule of Saint Benedict

That is the constant conumdrum--how to listen, not talk. Spiritual advisors give us libraries full of advice on practice and piety--words to say. Occasionally we get a hint of how to listen. The Zen masters gave more listening advice that Western spiritual experts (says she, muttering).

Here's one from Magnificat: "Deaf though we may be to the Word of God, God never ceases to send us messengers..." The skeptic wonders, where are they in my life? Jeremiah, are you there? The believer acknowledges that the scripture sits unopened on the desk, and on the table. The writer goes on, however. "...homilies, hymns, prayers, persons, events, experiences--to break through our deafness that we might hear and live." The skeptic again wonders how we know which of the many people and events--and prayers, homilies and hymns--are the ones we should listen to.

Perhaps the answer is all of them.

Prayer

And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard.
Be not you therefore like to them, for your Father knoweth what is needful for you, before you ask him.
Matthew 6:7-8

It came to me suddenly, how I pray.

Dear Lord, show me what you want from me; Thy will be done. Now, here's what I'm going to do for you. 1)...

God says, if you'll stop talking, perhaps I can get a word in edgewise. Let me know when you are ready.

Breathing

And the Lord God...breathed into his face the breath of life and so man became a living being.
Genesis 2:7

I was driven from the chapel Saturday by incense. Odd, that, but I simply couldn't breathe. I went up to my room and worked at breathing for a while. That was followed by a deep sleep.

When I read about cultivating silence, the author, whether Catholic, Christian or non-religious inevitably brings the discussion to breathing. Control your breathing, concentrate on your breathing, become aware of your breathing. Silent prayer, truly silent prayer in which you quiet the chatter in your head, usually involves the sound of your own breathing. I've come to see that as focusing on the point at which God holds you, oh so quietly, into existence, the tipping point between being and not being. At some point in faith you ought to be able to give it over utterly to Him. I don't know that I've ever gotten that far.

Asthma is a reminder of my frailty. Breath comes, and it could leave me. I am utterly dependent on God in the meantime.

Habemus Papam

"There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way" CS Lewis

The Church prays for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and then squabbles about the results. One man's long-wished for saint is another man's disaster.

In the eleventh century alone we survived influence peddling, anti-popes, intrigues in which the papacy was bought, sold, and left beholding to various factions. We also got reformers, two saints and a zealot who launched the crusades.

The Holy Spirit undoubtedly attends the conclave but He is not insurance that the resulting candidate will be perfect, or saintly, or easy to live with. He guides the Church no matter what. He is there to take care of the rest of us regardless of the results. If each of us would just listen, we would be better off.