23rd Tuesday in Ordinary Time

In the opening verse of today’s Gospel, St Luke says that “Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God”. That shows us that even Jesus needed time to get away for a while, to gain separation from the noise and distractions of the world. That’s good to know, because it means that those who follow Jesus will also need time away to pray to God. And not only monks.

St Basil was following Jesus’ example when he wrote: “It was to avoid the perils which everywhere abound that I withdrew into the mountains, like a bird who escaped the fowler’s net; for this reason I live in the desert, as Jesus Christ lived in it. It was there the patriarch Jacob saw the mysterious ladder, whose top reached the heavens, and on which angels appeared ascending and descending. In solitude the people of God were purified, and received the law; through the desert they were led to the possession of the promised land.
There the redeemer of the world frequently retired to pray, in order to teach us how to perform that holy exercise; there he demonstrated how much he loved solitude”.

So many of us have a fear of solitude and silence. But silence pulls us back into the real. In No Man Is an Island, Thomas Merton wrote, “It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion”. Silence also puts us in touch with our dignity as God’s beloved and the freedom to rejoice in the goodness and blessedness of the created world around us. Again, in the words of Merton, “There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in the wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the gift of my Creator’s thought and art within me” (The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton).

Silence is also the space in which God reveals himself. Into this silence, he speaks his word. Immersed in silence, we listen to God with “the ears of the heart”, as St Benedict put it. That’s just what Jesus did in this morning’s Gospel: he spent time in solitude and silent prayer to listen to the promptings of the Father and the Spirit. The time that our Lord dedicated to silence and solitude nourished his intimate relationship with the Father and gave birth to his words and actions that followed.

And yet silence is so undervalued and unsought in our culture. The silence of monks is not a burden but the space in which we can know ourselves more deeply and know God better. It’s meant to free us from distractions and noise, and lead us deeper into reality and all that is true. May our silent receiving of the Lord’s Body and Blood lead us deeper into the reality which is God.