GOOD SHEPHERD STAFFING

"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

"The older we become, the more we realize how limited we are in our ability to love, how impure our hearts are, and how complex our motivations are. And there is a real temptation to want to look inside of ourselves and clean it all out, and become people with a pure heart, unstained intentions, and unconditional love. Such an attempt is doomed to failure and leads us to ever greater despair. The more we look into ourselves and try to figure ourselves out, the more we become entangled in our own imperfections. Indeed, we cannot save ourselves." Henri Nouwen There is a heresy in the history of the Church called "Pelagianism". It denies our need for salvation from God. The idea is that we can do it ourselves. We live in a very Pelagian age. An age and a culture that values the productive. Doing. Inner discord is unacceptable in such a world. It threatens to take us off the "production line" --- As such we don't like reliance. We don't like that something is out of our reach, unattainable. Yet this is the a fundamental bedrock of the Christian message. Our inner worlds are so complex, so obscure... There are multiple massive industries designed to have us sitting on couches attempting to unravel and understand ourselves and the causes of our actions. St Paul tells us in Romans "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" Who cannot relate? And if all the talking on the couch doesn't do it there are a plethora of pills to take. And if that doesn't work the entire rest of the economy is filled with distraction so you can find some relief from the dilemma. What Nouwen is talking about is a surrender to God. That we will never really figure it out. If you don't believe this about yourself look at your husband or wife or children and ask yourself what you really know about them. If you are honest the best you get is some approximation. In their depths they are as unfathomable to you as you are to yourself. ------ What we need is not to fix the unfixable. What we need is mercy. We need the grace of God. We need the peace that can come through our surrender to love. A love that can cast a light into that inner darkness and convert it into itself. There is no "solution" to the human condition, save one. The acceptance of the free offer of grace that comes when you lay this inner burden at the foot of the cross and you, in all humility, admit that you cannot carry it alone. Because you can't And if you are honest you know you can't And there is no pill, no frog in some jungle to lick, and no human intervention that is going to save you. But He can. And will. If you let Him Will you?

"But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for finding himself. If he persists in shifting this responsibility to someone else he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are." Thomas Merton According to Aristotle we are social animals by nature. Why else would we pick up language so easily if it were not in our nature to be with others(there is no such things as a private language) And perhaps a lot of our current societal woes are due to the fact that we have fallen under the sway of modern political theory which focuses too heavily on the rights of the individual instead of better balancing his rights with his duties to his fellow man. This over focus on rights leads logically to a kind of atomization which is one of the main factors that Hannah Arendt, the famous scholar of the roots of totalitarianism, said is a precursor to totalitarian political rule. 1) We are not supposed to be alone and isolated. 2) If we are we become angry and upset. 3) Political ruler comes along promises some better future. 4) We submit...because it is in our nature to belong to SOMETHING and at least the ruler is offering this. I see this as an interesting line of reasoning and if it interests you I recommend Patrick Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed" for a longer treatment. But the Merton quote cuts to the most important aspect of ourselves as individuals. That we must find, for ourselves, who we are and why we were born. We must make peace with our own existence...or not. I cannot do this for you and you cannot do this for me. We are each out walking in the forest as the Poet in Dante's Divine Comedy. In the poem Dante is lost in the woods for having tried to find his own way. He meets a guide in Virgil the poet who begins to take him on a descent into hell. This is often how it works for us. We use our freedom to make stupid choices that in our youthful ignorance look and seem appealing. This series of choices leads us to differing levels of misery and desolation. Once we have tasted as far as we need in this direction(everyone is different as to how many levels of hell we must taste before we turn around) We begin to look for a path out of darkness. This is where, for me, God came into my life. And in so doing, through His grace, I was able to realize that I was created by and for Him to glorify Him and to serve Him and my fellow man. I was welcomed back to my home by the Lord like His prodigal son, with open arms. No one could have taken this journey for me. In fact it has baffled many people close to me including family and very dear friends. But, as close as they are to me and I to them... I cannot take their journey for them and they cannot do so for me. I cannot make peace with their creator for them. And they cannot do so for me. In the end we all journey across the river Styx...alone