Finding Silence

Right now is the perfect time for “pre-Lent” — a short period of time before Ash Wednesday when we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts and our environments for Lent. The time is now to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to renew your heart, transform your mind and reform your actions in order to rediscover (or truly discover for the first time) the mystery of our risen Lord.

In order to do this important work, find some silence. In that silence, determine how to create more silence. Lent should be quiet. In order to enter into the desert of Lent, we need both interior and exterior silence. Since we live in such a very noisy world, it’s going to take some time and effort to establish silence in our lives. We need to consider carefully how to distance ourselves from the distractions that fill life with so much noise that we can’t hear Our Lord and so much stuff that we can’t see him. Our world is not conducive to quiet recollection, so if we want to pursue it for Lent (and we do), we all need to be intentional.

Cardinal Robert Sarah’s powerful book, “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” is a beautiful place to begin. Don’t wait until Lent; start reading now to craft a quiet, pondering place for yourself throughout the 40 desert days.

This quest for quiet is an urgent one if we are to notice and listen to God. Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Noise begets more noise. God won’t compete with the noise. You won’t hear him over the din of daily life.

Consider all the ways you engage in noise. We live in a world of constant conversation. At the swipe of a finger, a myriad of voices comes alive in the palms of our hands. Looking for silence? Start there. Then, consider how our smartphone habits have created new circuits in our brains. We’ve trained ourselves to always be engaged in the noise of our world. Our brain is always busy. Cardinal Sarah poses an important question: “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” For human beings accustomed to being perpetually available, it’s good to ponder if our souls are similarly accessible to God.

We need to wake up to the power of silence. Noise numbs us. More accurately, we numb ourselves with noise. We are constantly hearing something, but are we truly listening? Or are we barricading our souls with a wall of noise because we are uncomfortable in the quiet? Cardinal Sarah challenges us to think about the role incessant distractions play in our lives. “Noise is a deceptive, addictive and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder and kneeling before God.”

What if this Lent is your time to encounter wonder? What if this is your season to kneel before God in silence and let him fill the void? What can you do right now to open yourself to that possibility?