Tag: silence
The Two Sides of Silence
Before embarking on some sort of journey, be it going to another destination, or planning a vacation etc., there can be the tendency to romanticize the process. Anticipation is often different than the actual experience. When pondering the need for silence, it can be one sided when it is simply being thought about or when… Read More ›
The Importance of Silence
Did you know that Microsoft has built a chamber at its hardware lab that’s just about perfectly silent — billed as the quietest room on the planet? It’s for testing the sounds made by its tablets, with no interference whatsoever from even the slightest external noise, lined thickly with sound-absorbent tiles and separated from the… Read More ›
The difficult art of being present
How often do we miss the genuine encounter — with God and with others — because we don’t know how to be still? One year ago, when Pope Francis paid a weeklong visit to the United States, a telling photograph made the rounds on social media. The picture, for once, was not of the joyful… Read More ›
Respecting Solitude
If a man does not know the value of his own loneliness, how can he respect another’s solitude? It is at once our loneliness and our dignity to have an incommunicable personality that is ours, ours alone and no one else’s, and will be so forever. When human society fulfills its true function the persons… Read More ›
Seeking God Perfectly
This is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of… Read More ›
The Silence of the World is Real
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement… Read More ›
Fruitful Silence
Life is not to be regarded as an uninterrupted flow of words which is finally silenced by death. Its rhythm develops in silence, comes to the surface in moments of necessary expression, returns to deeper silence, culminates in a final declaration, then ascends quietly into the silence of Heaven which resounds with unending praise. Those… Read More ›
The first step toward finding God
Man’s intelligence, however we may misuse it, is far too keen and too sure to rest for long in error. It may embrace a lie and cling to it stubbornly, believing it to be true: but it cannot find true rest in falsehood. The mind that is in love with error wears itself out with… Read More ›
Inner silence (I still struggle with it)
The silent soul is capable of attaining the closest union with God. It lives almost always under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. God works in a silent soul without hindrance—Faustina’s diary 477 (e) ++++++++++ There is a great deal written about inner silence. Silence is important, to be able to quiet the mind which… Read More ›
You must have harmony inside before discerning a decison
Everyone talks about peace — “Do what gives you peace,” “Wait until you feel peace” — but what brings peace? We always hear about it: peace in the soul, in the seat of the heart. We all yearn for it. Jesus said, “My peace I give you.” It’s ours for the taking. But how do… Read More ›