Misery loves solitude, but solitude loves silence. Misery isn’t silent, which is why solitude will never completely welcome it; this particular phenomenology explains why some people will remain miserable when they’re alone and others will find peace. Peace is only obtainable through the acceptance and respect of silence.
7When you have been mentally abused since you were a child. I probably didn’t deserve it any other way. I am nothing more than a piece of dirt.
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HOMILY for the 3rd Sunday per annum (B)
Jonah 3:1-5,10; Ps 24; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
Since 2019, Pope Francis has decided that this Sunday, the Third in ‘Ordinary Time’, should be designated the Sunday of the Word of God. We’re invited, therefore, to consider this marvellous truth: that ours is a God who speaks; a God who has chosen to communicate his wisdom and his truth to us; a God who instructs us and teaches us, and shows us, in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the most fundamentally divine way of love, a way that we human beings have been called to follow so that we can become divine, sharers in the life and happiness of God himself.
Hence, God speaks to Jonah, and he instructs him to “go and preach” to Nineveh, and to proclaim the Word of God to them. But, as a friar preacher, it seems to me in the first place that of more import than the act of preaching is the act of listening. For the preacher first has to listen before he should speak. It is said in the Order of Preachers that silence is the father of preachers, for silent prayer – being with God in the silence of our own rooms, our own hearts – must come before any preaching. So, too, as Christians we’re all called to foster silence, solitude, quiet for God. For many people, this past year has forced upon us more silence and isolation and aloneness than we’d like. Hence, not all silence is good - there can be a frosty, nervous, uneasy silence too. However, in the silence, if we expect to encounter the God who speaks, then we are never truly alone. Rather, we are still, with God, and so there is the fruitful silence of contemplative prayer in which we can quietly wait for God to gracefully reveal himself, in his good time. This is the silence of Mary, the silence of St Joseph, the silence of Jonah, too, in the belly of the whale.
For at first Jonah flees from the Word of God, and he doesn’t want to listen, he struggles to do as God asks him. But, as we know, he is famously cast overboard and is swallowed by a whale. And there, in that silence, he changes his mind and he listens to God’s Word, so that at last he goes to Nineveh and preaches God’s Word. But Jonah’s mission would still have been in vain had the people not listened and acted upon it. The people of Nineveh fasted and repented, they believed the Word of God and responded. So, too, we who hear God’s Word week after week also have to respond.
It’s easy, like Jonah, to run away, to return to the same old lives, week after week, unchallenged and unchanged by God’s Word – we’ve heard it all before, haven’t we, these same old readings in a 3-year cycle? And yet, God’s Word is “alive and active”, God’s Holy Spirit who inspired it millennia ago has a message for you and me right now, today, but first we have to expect to hear his Word, we have to listen, we must come to the Mass asking: What does God want to say to me today? Perhaps we can prepare for the Mass by looking up the passages online before hand and reading them in silence. In this way, we plough the soil of our hearts, and allow God’s Word to be sown during the Sunday Liturgy.
For as the Gospel today shows, the Word of God summons us to follow him. The Word challenges us to go on a journey, on an adventure, indeed. As St Augustine once said: “To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.” The Word of God, therefore, is alive and active, and it calls to you, he calls you to follow him, he calls us to befriend him, and so he entices us to fall in love with God. So Jesus says: “You must love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
It is inevitable, if we allow God to speak to us in the silence, if we open the Scriptures, and read and pray with the Word of God, that we will be brought to repentance. The Greek word, as you’ll know is metanoia, which means, really to go beyond our current mind, our present ways of thinking, our limited ways of seeing things. So often we interpret the world and current affairs according to human wisdom; we see things as we know how, according to the ways of the world. But Jesus calls us to repent because the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. In other words, he’s calling us to follow his ways of thinking, his ways of seeing things, his wisdom, and his vision of what it means to be human – and Jesus’s ways are the ways of heaven, the ways of God, the ways of Love. So, to repent is to move beyond our limited sinful human ways, breaking through the narrow confines of sin, and embracing God’s broad vision for our lives, God’s plan for what it means to be human, God’s desire for a goal for us human beings that goes beyond our imagining. For Christ, the Word of God, has come to promise us that God desires us to share in his divine nature; in Christ and through Baptism, the Father has called us his beloved sons and daughters; and Jesus shows us that God has the last Word over suffering, sickness and death. For Christ is risen, alleluia!
This is the Good News that has been spoken to us, but the Gospel of Christ must become my good news – not something abstract, not something we’ve merely heard about, not something we’ve been told, but the daily reality of my life. This is a work of God’s grace, as we listen to the Word, as we pray in silence and meditate on God’s Word, and so we made ourselves available each day to encounter God. The world is noisy and full of distractions and worries and concerns, and these drown out the silence, like white noise buzzing away in the background. So, every Sunday at least, come away and, in silence, let us listen out for God’s Word. As Pope Francis says: “The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk; whenever we take a step towards Jesus, we come to realize that he is already there, waiting for us with open arms.”
So, we follow Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John, and we go to the Lord, we run towards him in prayer, through this Sacrament of the Eucharist. Thus we shall also become “fishers of men”: we are not swallowed up by the whale as Jonah had been because he ran away from God’s Word. But rather, we swallow and take into our bodies the Word of God, the Word who is alive and active in the Eucharist, the Word of God who will take flesh in us by gracefully forming us in what we think, and how we behave, and what we do until we also become truly sons and daughters of God. So, “follow me” says the Lord, “follow my Word, follow my ways, listen to my teaching and learn to love truly, fully, with your whole being”. Because, then, as Christ our God said to St Augustine,“You will be changed into me”!
3📖📙"The #more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” 😊💯💟
For more quotes check out this page.Thank you 💯💜
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Rosa /silenzio- to the moon-
#thewayisee #silence #color #whereilive #walking
https://www.instagram.com/p/CKZM-AVlNz4/?igshid=1ommp7f0h7igl0LE CIEL DANS LA TERRE (Pierre Jean Jouve)
LE CIEL DANS LA TERRE (Pierre Jean Jouve)
LE CIEL DANS LA TERRE
Resplendissant doux jardin de couvent
Il n’y a rien de plus reluisant que ta folle plante
Rien de plus amoureux que le jour à ton sein
Rien de plus chaste que ta sueur claire
De silence de méditations et d’oiseaux verts.
(Pierre Jean Jouve)
Recueil: Les Noces suivi de Sueur de Sang
Traduction:
Editions: Gallimard
0Certains silences sont plus violents que le bruit
comme un suicide interne17
Tamino che sogna di sabato-
#tamino #dreaming #saturday #silence #colors
https://www.instagram.com/p/CKYrawHqjpd/?igshid=xyig0uswgny30
