Our need for silence

WE have to realize this more deeply. With all the hustle

and bustles of our world today, with all the noise and distractions

that we have, we have to exert tremendous effort to maintain silence,

both inside and outside us, if only to manage to pray.

            Prayer, as we all know, is our basic way of connecting

with our father God, the source of all good things. We have to do

everything to be able to pray, for without it we would be detaching

ourselves from the very foundation of our life.

            But given the conditions nowadays, prayer is practically

ignored and neglected, and even considered as a nuisance, irrelevant

and useless. Thus, many people are now trapped in a world of activism

and all forms of self-seeking and self-absorption.

            We have to recover the appreciation of prayer and the need

for silence and recollection to be able to pray. Christ himself, who

is already God, needed to pray. And in spite of the very demanding

redemptive work he had to do, he always exerted the effort to find

time and the appropriate place to pray.

            Many times, he had to wake up early, way before morning,

and to go to a deserted place to pray. There were even times when he

had to spend the whole night praying. And let’s not forget that before

he launched his public life, he spent forty days in a desert to pray

and fast.

            Christ withdrew from the crowd to have silence and

recollection, so indispensable for him to pray. We should also realize

that we need to have silence and recollection to keep our relation

with God strong and vibrant.

            We cannot deny that it is when we manage to have silence

and recollection that we can listen more to the voice of God who is

actually always intervening in our life. We would become more

discerning of God’s will and ways, and more able to be docile to him.

            We obviously have to do a lot of self-denial to achieve

this ideal condition for prayer. But we should not be surprised by

this and should be eager to go through them. Among the things we can

do in this regard are to always give priority to a time of prayer and

meditation and to look for the appropriate place and time for it.

            Ideally, it should be in a place of prayer like a church

or chapel and before the Blessed Sacrament. The time is whenever we

can be most at peace with God. We have to learn how to get away for

the meantime from our usual activities. More than this, we have to

know how to silence our passions, and to focus our inner

faculties—intelligence, will, imagination, memory, etc.—on God alone.

            That’s when we can start to hear and feel the promptings

of God. Let’s remember that more than us, it is God who directs our

prayer. He is the one who will show us things.

            Many times we have to force ourselves to go through this

process of attaining silence and recollection for our prayer. We have

to convince ourselves that for us to be able to pray, and to persevere

in it, we should feel the need for prayer more deeply. We can only

pray when we feel that need rather than when we depend on our wanting

to pray.

            That is part of the self-denial Christ is asking of us. We

should go beyond feelings and wanting. With our will, always supported

by God’s grace, we can manage to pray in spite of contradicting or

uncooperative feelings.

            When we manage to have silence and recollection in our

moments of meditation, it is likely also that we can manage to have

them when we get immersed in our daily routine of work and other

concerns. This is an art and skill that is so badly needed these days.