[Pearls Ep 126: Happy 4th of July]
We’ve been looking at unity with God – as individuals and society. This is an opportunity to return to a familiar theme – silence.
We’ve quoted time and again Venerable Fulton Sheen’s observation that there was once a time when it was easy to be a Christian in the US because the entire culture was Christian. He was referring to the turn of the last century.
A primary reason for our shared spirituality was our shared silence. A century ago life was hard – everyone was naturally mortified, which is to say most everyone had a ready capacity for discipline and self-denial. And a century ago life was quiet and so it came naturally to cultivate an interior silence in which God’s voice and His plan for our lives could be heard and lived out.
Exterior and interior silence are necessary for authentic spiritual growth – because spiritual growth is about growth in our relationship with Jesus Christ and you can’t have a relationship with someone if you can’t hear them over the noise.
Here we will look to Cardinal Sarah’s masterful “The Power of Silence”:
“Modern society can no longer do without the dictatorship of noise. It lulls us in an illusion of cheap democracy while snatching our freedom away with the subtle violence of the devil, the father of lies. But Jesus repeated tells us: ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’ (Jn 8:31-32)
Interior silence is the end of judgments, passions, and desires. Once we have acquired interior silence, we can transport it with us into the world and pray everywhere. But just as interior asceticism cannot be obtained without concrete mortifications, it is absurd to speak about interior silence without exterior silence.
Within silence there is a demand made on each one of us. Man controls his hours of activity if he knows how to enter into silence. The life of silence must be able to precede the active life.”
Silence is the basis for our interior life with God and our interior life with God is the basis for our activity in the world and relationships with others.
Looking to the present time, one of the main things that needs be done is to push back against the relentless noise of the world. A key part of that is daily silent meditation. A necessary compliment to that is purging ourselves of the exterior noise of the world (which leads to interior noise in our soul). Social media? 24/7 “news”? Endless entertainment streamed to the device of our choice? We need to be ruthless about weeding this stuff from our lives.
Detox diets are very popular these days and with good reason. People that go through them find, once their bodies have “recalibrated” to health food, that they can’t go back to processed and junk foods loaded with chemicals – their bodies recognize it for the poison it is. So too, with the endless noise of the world – when we separate from it, difficult as it may be at first, soon enough we recognize it for the poison it is.
As we wrap up our Independence Day reflections, we reinforce that the grave challenge to our nation, at the most basic level, is not political, not sociological, not economic.
It is spiritual.
And that’s good news indeed because, as we noted yesterday, our God is intimately concerned with us individually, and as a society.
Blessing on your journey with Christ –
Steve and Karen Smith – Interior Life
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