Silence!  A Reflection for 11/4/19:

      Hanging out this weekend I began to contemplate the concept of silence.  This may be because when you’re around two teenage boys there isn’t much of it.  One could also suggest, however, that silence no longer truly exists due to the constant streaming, advertising, messaging, marketing and overall digital society of which we live in.  From the time we wake until the time we lay back down at night, we are bombarded by images and suggestions that are meant to combat silence by filling any “dead space” with a suggestive noise.  The kind of noise that tells us “we deserve this/that” and that we should have it now.  The kind of noise that compares everything we are and everything we have to everything we are “supposed” to be in life, all while suggesting that the path to get to that “supposed to be” should be faster, cheaper, and have fewer demands. 

      We substitute personal interaction and discussions with texting and endless social media messaging.  We can order anything of desire, from clothing, appliances and now even food to our doors without ever getting up.  I have even watched a three-year-old tell a can of air freshener to “turn on the lights” because she thought it was a voice command device.  To summarize, our modern world is teaching us a level of entitlement never witnessed before.  Please don’t misunderstand me.  I too am a consumer, and like many others, I often enjoy the consumerist modernity that we live in today.  However, where I fear that our ideology has hurt us the most is in the area of our spiritual lives.  Many people have come to believe they can reach God’s Holiness with a shortcut, purchase, or title without any personal sacrifice to be made.  Proof in this can be taken from the way many pray.  “God grant me; God help me do, get, have, accomplish..; God provide me with the means, ability, money, title, etc.”  It is as if God’s grace can be clicked into our shopping carts in the same search as those shoes we want as we are scrolling Amazon.  Furthermore, even if God is answering all those demands contained within our prayers, how can we hear him if we never shut some of the noise down? 

     Contact and conversation with the Ever-living God cannot be found in noise.  “What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite and with our tongue, for the language He best hears is silent love” (St. John of the Cross).  Silence is the answer to the question of how to find peace in modernity.  Silence calms our restless spirit and allows us to enter into a true conversation, a relationship with God.  Silence isn’t something that just happens; it takes effort.  Silence, in order to be successful, requires us to put down our phones, shut off our devices, and shut our doors.  It is something we must do intentionally.  To succeed at silence, we must daily strive to find times to pause and reflect in order to remove ourselves from the constant barrage of modernity, and enter into a humble, attentive, spiritual relationship with our Heavenly Father. 

Mr. Swann/Principal

Our Lady of Mount Carmel