Master 9 and I were talking about Saint Anthony of Padua this week. It was his feast day and I’d taken the kids to a weekday Mass that evening.
Master 9 asked how long it was after we asked Saint Anthony for help that he answered.
It was, and remains, a good question.
And my answer?
It all depends on whether we’re listening or not.
If we call on Saint Anthony for his help in finding a lost item but, in the meantime while we wait for his direction, we continue looking at a frenzied pace going over all the places we’ve already looked, then we’re never going to hear him.
God, and His Saints, can only be heard in the silence. If our brain is too active, too frenetic and too stressed we can’t hear them. Their message is lost in the static.
“So if you’re brain is too busy,” said Master 9, “then you can’t hear Saint Anthony tell you where you left the thing you lost?”
It might seem a little simplistic, but he’s on the right track.
In my own spiritual life I’ve experienced something recently which only reinforced this reality – hearing God only in the silence.
We’ve recently moved house. Between moving, during the school term, and cleaning and undertaking some maintenance at the previous house, as well as my paid employment (one day per week) it’s been hectic to say the least. Added to all of this has been earlier starts in the morning due to our now living 30mins out of town.
Don’t get me wrong, I love where we are now. The whole family does. But it’s been a transition and I just felt like I was suffocated by work, by a never ending to-do list. I’d crawl into bed of an evening and attempt my regular spiritual reading but fall asleep instead. My evening prayer consisted primarily of a few spontaneous prayers of thanksgiving and petition.
Our family Rosary went on hiatus as children, adjusting to an earlier routine, were literally falling asleep at the table. We generally pray the Rosary after dinner.
In being so consumed with the practicalities of moving our prayers faded to our morning offerings, Sunday Mass, Friday School Mass, and our prayers before bedtime.
I knew this season wouldn’t last but we seemed to be caught up in it and I was concerned. I kept trying to find a way to fix this problem, racking my brains for a more suitable time for the Rosary and so on.
About four weeks after we moved, feeling in dire need of spiritual nourishment I attended a Women’s Recollection, now conveniently 5 mins up the road from our new house. A friend of mine was reading a reflection from Josemaria Escriva’s Christ is Passing By and this is part of what she read out:
“Our whole day can be a time for prayer – from night to morning and from morning to night. In fact, as holy Scripture reminds us, even our sleep should be a prayer.” [cf. Deut 6:6, 7]
He further explains that sometimes prayer takes the form of our routine, habitual prayers like the Rosary but at other times “all we’ll need will be two or three words, said with the quickness of a dart” and other times “dedicated exclusively to our conversation with God, moments of silent dialogue, before the tabernacle if possible.”
This mediation, followed by Confession, opened the door for me to find the peace I needed to get through this busy time. And I wouldn’t have heard His voice in these words if I had not taken the time out of my hectic life to spend that time in silence with God.
God is speaking to all of us, nudging us along our individual paths. But we can only hear Him in the silence. And sometimes this means trusting more in God than in our own efforts, simply by taking the time to clear our mind and heart to listen to Him.
Originally posted 2017-07-25 15:00:39.