Monday Musings - Servant of God Catherine Doherty Reminds Us That We Need Silence

[The bombardment of unending noise reaches a crescendo during political campaigns, especially when the position being sought is the Presidency of these [un]United States. To be sure that we will never have to subject ourselves to even a moment of silence, we can turn on our television sets at any time of the day and night and have our ears attacked by a limitless number of self-proclaimed expert talking heads whose primary job is not to convey truth or to ask probing and intelligent questions that would assist at getting to the truth, but rather to fill the screen with divisive noise.

This unending noise, Robert Cardinal Sarah reminds us in The Power of Silence – Against the Dictatorship of Noise, prevents us from ever hearing God since “We encounter God only in the eternal silence in which He abides.”

This good and gifted Cardinal is not the first, and will certainly not be the last soul, to encourage us to rediscover the sacredness and necessity of silence. 

Let me share what Servant of God Catherine Doherty, the founder of the Madonna House Apostolate, had to say about this subject in 1991. The article that follows is an excerpt from a publication entitled Welcome Pilgrim which is currently out of print. This specific passage was published in the February 2020 issue of Restoration, the newsletter for the Madonna House Apostolate:]

“It seems to me, as I sit by my window at eventide, that what we need is a true encounter with our Brother, Jesus Christ.

We need to open ourselves completely to the work of the Holy Spirit so as to find God the Father in whom alone is our peace, our security, and our joy.

It-seems to me that we must enter into the silence of Mary, the little, simple, holy Jewish maid who knew so well how to repeat her fiats (her yeses). They made every moment of her day secure in her trust of God, even though there were a thousand things that she did not understand but which she kept in her heart, in faith.

Silence will heal the wounds inflicted by the endless words that swarm around us, exhaust us, tire us beyond all tiredness. We need silence in our noisy, work—filled life, as a child needs its mother's milk.

We need to be alone with God. We need to have a desert, be it only a corner of some apartment, some house, where we can go and rest with God. We need to follow him to some hill, to some garden where He Himself was also wont to pray when He was tired and weary and distressed.

We need silence in order to be able to listen to our brothers and sisters, to listen with the heart. We need silence to open our souls to our brothers, making an inn for the thousands who may be living in palatial homes but have no place to lay their heads of loneliness.

We need that silence to be able to speak a few words charged with our love; charged with Christ.”

[Let me remind all who read this post that there is no better place on this earth to experience the sacred and reverent silence both Cardinal Sarah and Catherine Doherty tell us we need and to hear the voice of God, than to spend time before the Blessed Sacrament. Why not resolve to do so this Lent?]