On Quietness

Dear brother or sister in Christ,

The day is loud. The room you are reading in may be quiet, but somewhere within reach is a thing that hums — a screen, a notification, a half-finished thought waiting to be picked up again. We live inside a great hum, and the hum is the same in every city.

The fathers of the desert knew a different hum. They knew the wind across the dry stones, the slow drip of water from a cistern, the bell that called them from one hour to the next. They did not pretend that the world was kind. They had walked out into the desert precisely because they understood it. What they sought there was not the absence of sound, but the presence of the Lord — and they had learned that the Lord most often speaks where the rooms are emptied of their humming.

We are not all called to the desert. Most of us are called to a different kind of stillness — the small fold of silence inside a busy day, the quiet of the table before grace is said, the moment between the door of the house and the door of the car when one might breathe and remember whose child one is. These are little deserts. They are enough.

The Lord can speak in the hum if he must, and he often does. But he much prefers to speak in the quiet, where his voice is clearer and the heart can hear it without straining.

Set down the device for ten minutes. Open the window. Watch a bird go by. Pray one verse. The Lord is gathering you to himself, in pieces, like a mother gathers her child after a long day at school.

We pray for you in the quiet hour.

May the Lord bless thee and keep thee.

A brother in Christ