Sifting through the Noise

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

In his book “The Power of Silence,” Robert Cardinal Sara writes about how we are bombarded with stimuli and how much that affects our sense of presence and serenity and even our relationship with God. I’ll let him speak:

“Far from God and from the lights that spring from the true Light, man can no longer see the stars, cities have become such flashlights that dazzle our eyes. Modern life does not allow us to look calmly at things.”  (p. 43. The emphasis is mine.) . . . . .

Can you take just a moment and look calmly at just a single thing you can see, much like I spoke about gazing upon a big of grass in the cloister last week?

If we could develop the ability to look calmly at the other people in our life, how much would the quality of our life and relationships be transformed? This is something we have to practice, because the world is armed to defeat us in our efforts to live reflectively and to allow God to see the world through our own eyes (and ears and touch). I can’t help thinking of the outcry made by a young monk in Rilke’s poem “Ich verinne:”

“I am aware of so many senses,

all of them thirsting with new demands.

Painfully in a hundred parts

I throb and tense . . . “ (transl. by Susan Ranson)

How do we vibrate and how great is our tension? And what can we do to relieve ourselves, and to lessen the tightened coils within us? What concrete, specific steps can we take to eliminate some of the sensory noise that tears us away from the true Reality and Beauty of our lives lived in God’s embrace?

Turn off the television? Spend less time on line? Simplify our environments? This is a question that each of us needs to answer for ourselves. (For today, after I post this reflection to Facebook, I won’t waste any time looking over the trivialities it offers me every time I go there.)

Cardinal Sara says it so eloquently, and I’ll close by letting him have the last word:

“Man feels obliged to seek ever new realities that give him an appetite to own things; but his eyes are red, haggard, and sick. The artificial spectacles and the screens glowing uninterruptedly try to bewitch the mind and the soul. In the brightly lit prisons of the modern world, man is separated from himself and from God. He is riveted to ephemeral things, farther and farther away from what is essential.”

Find what is essential and you will bring more joy into your life.

God bless you!