A Still Small Voice

Photo by Kristina Flour 

I love to read! I like watching a great mystery, sporting event, or CNN on TV! I like doing research on things I don’t know! I like checking information on my iPhone, and I enjoy jotting down notes on a yellow legal pad if certain thoughts of interest come to my mind! The problem and challenge for me is there are occasions when I am doing all these things at the same time.

I must look silly in my world of multitasking. For me, I have always been this way. Periodically Vicki, will say, “Are you watching this show or game?” My response is always, “Of course!” I always have been conditioned to try to fill the “unforgiving minute.”

I tend to write blogs with a subject that has come to me in many ways that I say that the universe is telling me something that I better pay attention to and share.

First, it was that quotation from Blaise Pascal, 17^th century philosopher (note the century in which he is saying this) that popped up in something I was reading: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” So do as I say and not what I do yet.

In the Inquirer there was an article by Jennifer Singer, “How Can We Be Comfortable With Silence? She indicates that Americans spend four hours a day listening or on media of some kind. So many of us particularly young people have a case of FOMO, fear of missing out. It is not only according to her research a matter of what we are getting but how fast we are getting it.  It is building a sense of instant gratification in a world and reality that does not function that way. Whoever made the first earbuds must be a multi-millionaire by now.

In the recent issue of The Atlantic, there is an article by Nancy Walecki that really got my attention and “forced” me to write this blog. Can Turning Off Your iPhone Bring You Closer to God? She refers to a book that she recommends, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. “In that book, Comer advances the theory that the great of enemy of the spiritual life is hurry. By this he means not simply busyness: Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurrying oneself through each day, a schedule that makes little room for God. He reminds us that Jesus took seriously the Sabbath, fasted and spent time in solitude and silence.

If you think finding solitude and silence is an easy thing to do, David Madison, Head of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, points to the fact that there are two questions that need to be addressed in schools and by those who aren’t. Give mindfulness, a means to find silence a chance and ask yourself. (If you want to get started on mindfulness, check Jon Kabot-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living which was read by Vicki and me in courses that we took.)

The two questions are that requires our reflection are: What are we afraid to find if we stop filling the silence?

And beneath that, quieter still. What might find us?

“Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 40:10)