The Silence

 

Silence in the spiritual life unifies the heart and expands interiority, opening us to the relationship with God in a deeper and more radical way, transforming all life and enabling us to listen attentively to the Word of God.

This expression of St. Paul means that when something of him dies Christ can enter his heart. "When I go out, God comes in." When something dies, God shows up. Silence is to make God present. It is having the experience of the eternal in our life. When something is present, we don't have to imagine it. We are used to thinking and imagining. You have to feel and not think. So, it is with God's world. We think about it, but we don't feel it as presence. Silence can make God evident. No intermediaries. Without stopping the possibility of an encounter full of experience.

Silence entails the capacity for listening, dialogue, reflection and depth in the word. In silence the word reaches fullness.  It instills tenderness, respect and tolerance in us, helps us to place ourselves in the place of the other, to be understanding and compassionate. It enables us to be open to the new and to love for all men and women, particularly those most in need. The person grows in silence, because it is the way to descend to the depths of our being, to confront oneself.

Holiness: Today We Are Very Close to Men and Women Who Are Real Saints.

Today's celebration not only comes to remind us of the saints who have preceded us and to teach us the path that has led them to complete happiness. It also wants us to discover the saints who accompany us now and here on our earthly path.

In today's demystifying and desacralizing world, it seems like an antiquarian find to stumble upon a saint. In fact, however, we are very close to men and women who are truly saints: men and women who walk the same path with us and who strive to achieve an authentically Christian life, faithful to the Gospel of Jesus; men and women who strive to be just and peacemakers, poor and compassionate, pure of heart and compassionate in heart, according to the spirit of the beatitudes.

Today there are saints who live among us. Maybe it's hard for us to discover them. But there they are. The thing is that they are silent. And that's why they go unnoticed among us, even if we bump into them in the store or the market, at work or at the bar. They are the saints of today and from here that we still have to discover.

Every human being, and especially contemporary being, sees, above all, things, ideas, businesses, machines around him; and distractedly and lightly, around and on the occasion of that skein of material, bureaucratic or mental structures, he perceives people, of whom he barely cares.

The saint, for his part, has slowly modified his view and placed his selective sensitivity on the true scale of values: his universe has become personalized: the first thing he sees in the human network in which he is immersed are people, they are even brothers. "For whom Christ has died"; and simply, around and at the service of these people, all the earthly structures that allow them or not to reach the Kingdom of God.

The saint, in the midst of a humanity divided by ideology, economy, race, more than ever separated into rich and poor; knows that in that humanity sin reigns: where men confront each other before they meet, they do not know each other before they discover each other, they remain indifferent to each other at the very moment in which their wealth changes. The saint is the first to know that the reconciliation of humanity has cost the cross of Christ and that he himself will have to add what is missing to the sufferings of Christ for his Body, which is the Church.

Fr. Robert Nsinga Mccj

 

Everything was good and the human was very good

 

There is a phrase that runs through the entire first chapter of the book of Genesis, which narrates the creative work. A sentence that is repeated six times and has no more than one word, introduced by a colon. This phrase is: good! This is the epilogue of each day of creation, the affirmation of the good existence of the creature. God calls his own work good. He has done it. It's good. God, the only creative subject, by affirming the goodness of things, makes them independent, frees them. Created by God, they are good by themselves. 

When humans make something, a painting, a house, we leave our mark, the imprint of our personality on what we do. But when God creates, what is done has its own consistency. For this reason, he remains expelled from the realm of the divine. This is one of the possible theological meanings of the plural of what is created: the waters, the luminaries, the herbs, the animals. For ancient mythology, the Sun and the Moon, in the singular, seem unique in their kind and are individualized as divine persons. In the Genesis account they become luminaries and this plural gender introduces them into the world of creation. 

But suddenly a change occurs in God's speaking. For his last creative act, God says: Let's make a human being. Let's do. When it came to creating the rest of the things, Genesis expressed itself in an impersonal way: Said God. But now, for the first time, the Creator is no longer spoken of, but the Creator speaks. Instead of it, an I. And more than an I, a you in which the I says to itself: let's do. Before, what the Creator did was told. Now the phrase takes on a personal meaning.

It is a self that speaks in the plural: let's do. That means no me outside of him. It is the plural of absolute majesty: a self that talks to itself and can only talk to itself. And when God takes the word personally, a person appears who does not need to be mediated by gender, someone who is no longer created "after his kind." That's why it's not plural because being many, each one is unique and unrepeatable. Each one is unique, with its own name, in the image of God.

God takes one last look at what he has created. And now he turns out… very good. God compares. He surpasses himself. There is a scope that is stated differently: “very” (good), that is, of a higher level than everything else.

 

To choose life is to live "day and night"

We experience day and night alternately.No one can escape from day and night. This one, dark and often in solitude, costs more. It is not easy to adapt to the low slope, to the weakly illuminated path where the parts of the unwanted person itself are being rewrapped, repressed parts that need to be integrated into a new identity more authentic and real. Those feelings of passivity, dependence, weakness, fragility, inevitable frustration...

In this society, as hypocritical possibly as that of any other era, and in the representation of the theater of this world, the weak are mis seen. Society pushes for "character"; a solid character that makes us effective and predictable. But true human wealth does not go down the line of character that grabs and mechanized. We tend to relate to others from our safety, qualities, money, talent, culture, hiding our weaknesses and limitations, without realizing that they are also human and that it is through them that others can feel the same. Then they may not admire us, but they will love us; and this is what really saves us.

In our society today you have to be very mature to relate to yourself and others from one's own weakness and poverty. And even more so to be able to share it without feeling superior to anyone, but the same, and letting yourself be accompanied. This vital journey of day and night goes through crisis, at a time when the questions and the crucial situations are greater than the vital answers available to us, thus destabilizing our psychology, which begins to emit signals.