I WONDER IF YOU’VE NOTICED HOW QUIET
THE WORLD IS? Taking the bus to Tesco on
Thursday, the roads were strangely empty and, apart from all the applause at 8
o’clock on Thursday evening, our neighbourhood is hushed. And so, it seems, is
God. I’m sure there are many who wonder at the apparent Divine silence in the
midst of this pandemic and consider that confirms there’s no such thing as
‘God’; or, if there is, God is certainly not good, otherwise he would have done
something, a view which many embraced, for example, in the face of the horrors
of past Holocausts.
Many have tried to understand why
God seemed absent when needed by his people.
Some have realised that, having created humankind in freedom, God cannot
step in and interfere – God has to remain hidden. Others say that to deny God
in the face of tragedy would compound the nature of evil, whilst many realise
that to take God out of the equation simply limits the resources we have to
cope in such situations. And some, looking at how suffering is dealt with in
the Book of Job, realise it’s right to cry out about it whilst not letting it
become overwhelming, something that we also see in the way Christ lived through
his Passion, which we’ll shortly recall during Holy Week. They look at the events of that Week and
realise – God is right there, in the heart of pain and loss, suffering and
death, through the agony of crucifixion when even Christ cried out, ‘My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?’ Yet, in
the end, he commended himself into the hands of his Father.
There’s a mystery to suffering
which we can never fully understand, but one thing is clear. The generational upheavals
societies experience due to war or disease reveal what lies within – both the
‘bad’ and the ‘good’. Without such appalling tragedies, would we ever know what
lay in the depths of our humanity?
I WAS BORN a year after the end
of the last World War and, for a long time, knew nothing of its horrors. My generation were told “You’ve never had it
so good.” and that, for many, was correct.
Occasionally some might have suffered from disasters, floods and storms,
but it was people living in countries remote from ours who experienced war,
famine and infectious epidemics. And I, for one, wondered at people who, in
such places, were still able to proclaim their faith in God, who said inshallah,
it is God’s will. Could disaster be
God’s will? Is that what they
meant? As part of a generation who
believed widespread disease had been medically eliminated and that any sickness
could be cured by a visit to the doctor, the thought that pain and suffering
were the context of belief suggested a cruel God was the cause. It is God’s will. Now,
for a while, the West – like most of the rest of the world – is again subject to
those twins of pain and suffering and in it all, there seems only a Godly
silence.
FOR SO LONG we, in so-called
advanced societies, haven’t needed God, “we’re all atheists now” one BBC news
presenter asserted recently. Only in
emergencies might God be privately addressed, as some turn to this ancient
Mystery for solace. But we no longer
need a supernatural magician to solve our needs. We expect them to be answered instantly – at
the press of a button – and forget the long, patient, creative and sometimes,
painful ways in which those needs are answered.
Whatever lies beyond our immediate human comfort-zone isn’t of great
interest to many who are satisfied by spending hours on their i-phone, visits
to the pub and gym, holiday’s in far-flung places and Saturdays watching
sport. Not that there’s anything wrong
with any of that – in moderation – but ‘Life’ for many has lost any sense of
mystery and is merely something which ought to give us what we want when we
want it. Now, when that life has suddenly ended for a while – and may not
return for some – there can be feelings of dread, dis-orientation and profound
confusion – even anger. Our landscape
has profoundly changed and we’re going through a seismic, spiritual shift. Yet still some say: God is there.
GOD IS PRESENT in so many small
and great acts of kindness and compassion, of selfless service and outreach (as
far as possible). God is still there in the wonder and mystery of the rest of
creation which, at times like this, we need to contemplate. And God is there in silence, as God has
always been. There for us in the same
way he was when another nation found itself in a wilderness, lost and confused,
longing for what had been and tempted to complain; there long ago when someone sat,
fearfully, at the mouth of a desert cave and wondered at the sound of sheer
silence; there when a Man was driven into the desert for forty days, tempted to
despair; yet where, in the silence of solitude, he found himself. There when people flocked to the emptiness of
the Desert at the start of Christianity.
There for those Religious who embrace solitude and silence. There as we
must fast from that which we normally look to, to feed us.
GOD IS PRESENT in our
hearts, a place some rarely visit. When
you’re occupied with so much else, stillness and silence can be qualities to be
avoided avoid. So, let us pray: ‘Penetrate
my heart, O God, by the radiance of your glance’ because it’s the person who
befriends these two, solitude and silence, who can enter that holiest
place.
MIGHT THIS BE A TIME, then, when our
culture has the opportunity to discover its depths? When, un-distracted by noise and activity, we
can see what we’re capable of through all those acts of selfless generosity;
when we have the opportunity of realising what lies within in the silence of
our hearts. No longer able to travel to
far-away places we suddenly have the chance of discovering our hidden, silent
soul. But we need those who have
travelled further into the depths of the heart, the centre of our being,
to guide us on the way. Those who have
realised that prayer is more than just asking for things, it’s a way of heart
speaking to Heart. That’s the subject for
tomorrow evening, at the same time, when I’ll also offer some reflections on
the connection between silence and prayer.
In the meantime:
Be
silent,
still,
aware,
for
there,
within
your own heart,
the
Spirit is at prayer.
Listen
and learn,
open
and find,
heart-wisdom.
Christ.
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