This past Monday, when I sat down to start my morning prayer in the corner of an empty bedroom in my house, I suddenly picked up the noise of the cars whizzing by on Eldorado Road, the big street in front of my community. I was puzzled and rather disturbed. Obviously, the traffic had been there before, but I didn’t notice it until then. Why now?
I think I became aware of the traffic noise because it was so quiet the week before when the unusual snowstorm befell on my neighborhood (and the whole Texas). The world around me was silent for almost a week.
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together,” wrote Thomas Carlyle. There is something about silence – and solitude – that makes it easier for us to hear the voice of God. Alone in the silence of his retreat room, St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, heard the call of God in 1928. Seven centuries earlier, St. Francis also heard God’s voice in the stillness of an abandoned chapel outside Assisi in Tuscany, Italy. Jesus himself escaped to the silence and solitude of the desert for 40 days before starting his ministry.
Sadly, for a city dweller like me, silence and solitude are a luxury. (I guess that was also true in Jesus’ time; thus, John the Baptist preached in the desert wilderness, not in “downtown” Jerusalem. But I’d say it is significantly worse in the hyperconnected modern cities.) The last time the world had been that quiet was a year ago in mid-March, when the menacing Covid storm was descending upon the North American shore. It seems only bad external circumstances can force us to be still. When I was growing up in Indonesia in the 1970s, Sunday used to be a quiet day. Everything was closed; even the daily newspaper didn’t come. Alas, those quiet Sundays are long gone.
When we can hear the voice of God in our heart, I suspect we’ll be able to live a simpler life, as we know what is important and what are fluffs. (If nothing else, the winter storm has shown us that we can live with less.) Maybe we’ll get to understand, as Matthew Kelly said, that what we become is infinitely more important than what we do or what we have. The saints throughout the ages certainly seemed to recognize that.
So, while I don’t wish for another record-breaking winter storm like last week, I relished the quietness that it brought. If those “silent days” ever come again, I promised myself that I would spend more time enjoying the silence and less time listening to the news.
REFLECTIONS ON LIFE, WORK, AND FAITH IN THE 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA 