Ordinary 19

The Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a; Psalm 85; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:22-33

As I’ve grown older I have found I enter into, prefer and am more comfortable with silence. Quiet may be another term of expressing the experience. Whether at prayer, driving the car or out for a run.  I’ve opened doors to restaurants, immediately closed them, and gone somewhere else the muzak and ambient noise are so loud. Such a mass of sound accosts the human heart. In a society drowning in sound, words, and images, we often think that the best language for interpersonal communication is words and dialogue. However, to penetrate the world of spirit; it is silence, the language of God, that we need to cultivate. Silence has various shades.

There is the experience of an empty, useless silence, that awkward feeling when you walk into a crowded elevator. It’s worse when there is just one other person.

There is a silence filled with anticipation. “Will you marry me?” “Can you forgive me?”

Silence can herald fear. It is the fear of confronting oneself and our reality. It is a deadly silence. We keep it at bay with all sorts of busy-ness and sounds, anything that will distract us from interior listening.

There is a silence pregnant with presence and meaning. Years ago, I began every Advent Mass with five minutes of silence. I invited the congregation to close their eyes and concentrate on slowly and rhythmically breathing in the breath of God. What was quite noticeable, even with your eyes closed, is that when someone walked into the church after we had begun, you could feel in the air that they knew they had walked into the midst of something. It was not a room of empty silence but a purposeful silence. An encounter with a presence.

For all the meteorological bluster of driving winds, crashing rocks, earthquakes, and fire in the biblical passages there is also an awe-inspiring silence that inhabits the depths of the heart in these stories. A silence that is a presence.

Do you remember hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, Andrew and Camille? The eye of these destructive storms is remarkably characterized by light winds and clear, sun filled skies. Surrounding this serene center is the eyewall, a ring of towering thunderstorms where the most severe weather and highest winds of the cyclone occur. How fascinating that the most violent part of the storm and its interior quiet center occur side by side.

This is the experience of the prophet Elijah. Swirling around him like the eyewall of a hurricane is discouragement, fear, anger, and loneliness. He is on the run not only from the king but also from his God and ultimately from himself. In this experience, God is not present in storm and fire as he was on Sinai. The eye of Elijah’s personal storm – the sound of sheer silence – is the encounter with the divine presence from which Elijah veils his face.

Jesus also is alone. He chooses to be alone. He has fed the thousands, sent his disciples off on a boat, and like Elijah gone up on a mountain and entered into prayer. Jesus is alone, yet he is not alone. In choosing to live with silence, Jesus encounters the living God.

To enter sacred, purposeful, silence as Jesus did or to be unexpectedly confronted by divine silence as Elijah was, leads to an interior richness. You find yourself in the presence of the living God who reveals his face to us. Silence is the realm of divine abundance in whose presence we recognize ourselves as needy creatures. Silence is an opening of the human heart toward the divine. It is a pulling down of every defense in the face of God’s self-revealing. It is taking pleasure in pure relationship that every couple falling in love understands. Silence thus becomes the active expression of a living dialogue.

The liturgy offers us opportunities to be trained in sacred silence. The invitation, “Let us pray” is followed by silence before words are spoken. Silence follows each of the proclamations of God’s Word and the homily. Silence follows the reception of Holy Communion. It is the experience of a person praying before the Blessed Sacrament or a sacred image. Thus, silence becomes a place of deepening, of discerning, of personalizing the encounter with God.

Driving winds, earthquakes and fire swirl around our church and us in these present days. God is leading us to silence. God is inviting us to experience the depths and richness of our lives in Christ. How will we respond?

_{See Words and Gestures in the Liturgy by Antonio Donghi, A Pueblo Book, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minn. 2009.}