Faith on the Quad The Desert Experience: Interior and Exterior Silence

Mar 3, 2009

Without fully realizing it, we are constantly surrounded by noise. Our homes are saturated with television, and our cars with music.  Even walks outside are accompanied by the ipod.  If we are not careful, what seems like an innocuous trait of society can be a significant block to our spiritual lives.

 

“In order to hear the voice of God, one has to have silence in one's soul and to keep silence; not a gloomy silence but an interior silence; that is to say, recollected in God.”

--St. Faustina   

 

During Lent, we work to strip away temporal attachments through prayer and fasting; but we can enter more profoundly into the desert experience by withdrawing from the media world around us.  Not only is much of it destructive, but its relentless output prevents us from becoming recollected in God.

 

Once we turn off the sounds around us, we often become aware of the immense noise that echoes within us.  Quieting interior noise can be a struggle, and what is more, Christianity does not aim at a mere emptying of the mind.  St. Faustina clarifies this point by adding that the soul should be recollected in God.  But how are we, so used to distraction, to arrive at silence and recollection?

 

“The Rosary is by its nature a prayer for peace, since it consists in the contemplation of Christ, the Prince of Peace, the one who is “our peace” (Eph 2:14).” John Paul II

 

It is not without reason that the Rosary has prevailed for eight-hundred years and stands among the most recommended prayers: It is a school of prayer almost unfailing in its ability to calm the mind and foster deep prayer.  A synthesis of vocal and meditative prayer, John Paul II calls it an “exquisitely contemplative prayer,” and extols it as “among the finest and most praiseworthy traditions of Christian contemplation.”

 

By praying the Rosary, the restless interior voice is first caught up in the words of the gospel, "Hail, full of grace!" and the "Our Father" as the mind is led to meditate upon the gospel mysteries.  Without the element of vocal prayer, one might find it difficult to quiet the mind enough for meditation: Yet once we are able to rest in the arms of Mary, meditating upon the divine mysteries of her Divine Son, we begin to put on the mind of Christ.

 

By grace, the prayer of the Rosary can ultimately lead to recollection and contemplation-- which is described in the catechism as a "gaze.”  In this beautiful state, we simply look at Our Lord as He looks back at us.

 

Binding all of this together is the prayer of Our Lady, Mary the Mother of God, of whom Our Lord said, “Behold, your mother.”  The Woman foretold in Genesis who would crush the head of Satan; the Woman who appears gloriously in Revelation.  The prayers of Mary continually obtain for us the means to “Do whatever He tells you.” Jn 2:7 

 

In our desert experience this Lent, let us plunge more deeply into the silence which enables us to hear God.  Fostering a devotion to the Rosary, let us cultivate recollection of soul.

 

"Do not go out of thyself, return to thyself; it is in the interior of man that truth resides."  St. Augustine