Helping Catholics in developing countries find work that affords them a livable local wage and allows them to work from home near their families. Opus Dei...Lux et Veritas
"If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth" "God hidden within me. I find Him by hiding in the silence in which He is concealed." Thomas Merton I am in Switzerland doing some hiking before going to Skjope to meet up with the team at Growth Era. Walking in the woods today the idea came to me that as I have grown older I have sought out more and more silence. It is a bit strange perhaps because I am a musician and love beautiful sound. But there is something about silence that feeds my soul. I think that without prolonged periods of silence I would go crazy. Maybe this is why our world is so insane today. At least part of the reason. We have made it a kind of mission to fill every moment of our lives with... Noise. Aural noise. Busyness. Visual noise. This exhausts us. It drains us. It makes us deeply un happy and makes us sick. Thus sitting in silence, or walking in silence seems so strange to us. And yet this is where and how we can come to settle into our depths. This is where we can find the stillness that the Bible tells us will be our path to know God. "Be still and know that I am God" God cannot be some thing in the world. Some form. God must be that which silently holds all of this in existence. In Aquinas' latin "ipsum ese subsistens" the contingent act of "to be" itself. That sounds mysterious and of course it is. But in silence we can come to know. Not intellectually. But we can come to the sense of that which is, as Augustine put it- "intimo meo et superior summo meo" "more interior to me than my most intimate intimacy and superior to my highest summit." Time in silence, especially before the Blessed Sacrament, is when I am most filled with God's love and peace. ----- To go back to music- All notes begin as silence. They then have an existence in the form of a vibration. The vibration has a beginning, a peak and resolution.. Back to where it came. Back to silence. The more time I spend in silence the more I realize that the entire world is engulfed in this great silence. Things, people, buildings, planets, stars come and go. And yet the silence remains. Both giving birth and receiving the remains of...everything. And yet there it is. Indivisible. Whole. Merton (as always) puts it best. I'll end with this. "It seems to me that what I am made for is not speculation but silence and emptiness, to wait in darkness and receive the Word of God entirely in His Oneness and not broken up into all His shadows" Perhaps the salvation, the healing you are looking for is to be found not in some "thing" But in that great silent beyond where God waits to reveal Himself to you. Amen