The Art of Quiet

I really don't know when it happened, but without knowing it my mouth was shut. Not really by my own will {no conscious effort whatsoever} I was hushed in conversation, silenced in dialog, and left staring blankly at the glowing screen before me. For those of you that don't know me very well you probably haven't noticed much, but the rest of you I'm sure must have. I'm not nearly as outspoken as I once was. That might come as a shock to some of you, but I used to have a lot to say {understatement of the year}. I had an opinion about everything. My two cents jar was rapidly making me a rich man. But something has changed in me & whether or not that is for the better I really don't know yet. 

It's not that I have nothing to say. Oh contrar, I have more subject matter swelling my brain these days than ever before. And for once in my life my words have a little more merit behind them. But some great heart spasm has simply told me "NO, time to be quiet. Silence your tongue & just wait." For what we wait, my tongue and I, I do not know...

Yet amid the stillness I have begun to learn some things. Mostly things about myself and how I wish to live. Yes LIVE, as in flesh and blood and sweat and tears...not in thought and theory, idea and concept. Ever since coming back to the United States form Afghanistan life just seems a little more meaningful. As if the things I do {not so much the things I say} are what really coexists with the rest of creation. For in all honesty, simply talking about the poor, oppressed, displaced and lonely or crossing all my theological T's & I's, while these things are infinitely important and are the first step in many cases, eventually serve to isolate me from their reality all together. Poor PEOPLE become "poverty". Starving PEOPLE become "hunger". HUMAN BEINGS that are displaced from their homes, made into widows, orphans & refugees, then bombed and bombed and then bombed some more become "collateral-damage". War is what happens "over there". What great tragedy it is to have created "issues" out of human suffering so as to "manage" them {or at least manage our conscience so we don't have to see our contribution to them}. But these are the children of God who are blessed! So this is why my tongue has gone numb I suppose...

Many of us love to quote Francis of Assisi's words "there is no use walking anywhere to preach, unless ones walking is ones preaching." Ironically most of us can't realize the ignorance of even repeating those words as opposed to simply responding to them. I personally have shared them probably a thousand times while sitting comfortably in my privileged-white-suburban-middle-class life. Forgive me our beloved saint...

Thus after a lot of thought I have decided that this silence isn't such a bad thing after all. In fact I think practicing the art of quiet now and then could do us all a great deal of good. So it's with this that I walk out into the world once again...tomorrow we go...again...