If you're like me, there are some sounds which make me feel as if my brain is literally being fried. It makes me wonder if too much noise can destroy brain cells! And we are being exposed to more sounds, confusion, and just plain noise than humans have ever dealt with before. Of course, some sounds we choose to immerse ourselves in, wearing headphones while we walk outside, run, sit on trains, travel in cars. I'm sure people feel refreshed and more knowledgeable because of what they hear on those headphones, but they are also being disengaged from what is happening right in front of them and around them. And that's where God waits: in the here and now. In what's around us. Waiting, in the silence, to grow our brains, refocus our memories and emotions, teach us. Give us new life.
In "The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything," Fr. James Martin tells a story from the movie "Paris, Je T'Aime," about Carol, a mail-carrier from Denver, who finally arrives in Paris, the trip of her dreams, a trip she has saved her money for over a long period of time. She has traveled there alone. One day in Paris,
"....Carol wanders into a sunlit park and sits on a wooden bench. During the morning, she was surprised to find herself so pensive - about her work, her friends, her two dogs, her lost love, and her mother, who has recently died from cancer. As she sits silently, Carol sees signs of life all around her: couples talking animatedly, children in a playground, a woman resting on the green grass. A breeze gently stirs her brown hair. Then something extraordinary happens."
Later Carol reflects on the extraordinary insight that came to her as she sat silently on a park bench, allowing herself to become drawn into the world around her. She says
"Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I'd known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn't know what. Maybe it was something I had forgotten or something I've been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time joy and sadness. But not too much sadness. Because I felt alive. Yes, alive."
Isn't this what Jesus tells us that God always wants to give us - LIFE? In the silence, in allowing herself to experience the simple ordinary life that was going on around her, Carol's soul dipped beneath the surface. There she encountered the truth - the depth of God's eternal life flowing through everyone and everything and beneath it all, supporting it - the Life of God always joyously available to everyone. This life is available to us in the middle of sadness and joy, calm and turmoil. If only we don't run away from it.
Because sometimes - I included - we run away from reality. We anesthetize ourselves to escape pain, confusion, and anxiety, through "white noise:" T.V., movies, music, constant activity with others, even books. Anything that will keep us from thinking, from remembering, from experiencing unwelcome emotions. And, yes, sometimes we find God living in the sounds and the activity, waiting to bless us.
But if we are never silent, never sit or move just quietly observing life, sinking into it, there are deep insights into God and ourselves that we can miss. Sometimes I think that that is why God wakes me so often in the silence of the night, so I have to confront the thoughts, emotions, and insights that I avoided and evaded during the day.
Silence and silent places offer us a reprieve from our loud and cluttered world - and lives. They are an invitation to keep on walking on our own unique pilgrimages to find God. The God Who is everywhere, in everyone and everything. Waiting for us to find Him so He can give us more Life, Life as needed as Living Water to refresh and re-strengthen and heal us.
The Desert Fathers said "You need a spiritual pilgrimage. Begin by closing your mouth." We close our mouths by choosing time to be alone in silence, even slowing down our thoughts, by becoming receptive, by surrendering our points of view and our understanding. By deliberately and mindfully becoming empty so God can fill us with new wine. If we become still in the Presence of the Lord and wait patiently, He will give us our lives back. The lives we may not even have noticed that we were missing.