noise

How often I (and we) fill the world with noise.  I do it with my unwanted and unnecessary proclamations.  I too often do it with words spoken, with blog posts, and Facebook comments(!)

But more fundamentally, I do violence to silence by attacking and disrespecting it within.  From out of the heart comes a riot of vanity and futility.  As Thomas Merton says in his book, No Man is an Island:

“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…

“If our life is poured out in useless words we will never hear anything in the depths of our hearts, where Christ lives and speaks in silence.  We will never be anything, and in the end, when the time comes for us to declare who and what we are, we shall be found speechless at the moment of the crucial decision:  for we shall have said everything and exhausted ourselves in speech before we had anything to say.”

My noise seduces me to worship a god made with my own hands and thoughts.  The deep well of silence brings me to recollection of the God who lives beyond words.