SILENCE IN ADVENT IS SACRED

Praised be Jesus Christ! 

Another season of Advent is once again upon us, with all of its ancient beauty, mystery, and majesty.  Every year when Advent arrives I try to offer a reminder about what I would consider to be an important, even if unofficial, theme of the season:  the importance of silence. 

More and more sectors of the Church these days seem to be commenting about an overall lack of silence in our modern world.  Life has gotten so, so noisy.   What has made this possible is our mechanized era.  Decades ago,  society dove headlong into the frenzy of harvesting whatever benefits that new science could bring us, which included machines, devices, and a broad industrialization of life in general.  We never asked difficult questions about the consequences of such an embrace.   Those things did bring some benefits, but they also brought frenzy, clutter, de-humanization, and a distancing from the natural world.  

All of that could be said about life prior to, say…. 1960.   Add on top of it now the electronic age which has digitalized the mechanization push of the prior era.  In the name of apparently better communication, electronic media has exploded:  televisions, radios, computers, and now smart phones.   The end result of layers upon layers of societal mechanization and digitalization is that we rarely ever get a sense of peace and quiet anymore.  

What is worse, many of us welcome the noise and distraction because it drowns out the uncomfortable silence that no one is accustomed to anymore.   

Biblical revelation and the lives of the Saints all make clear that God speaks to us the best in silence.  We need it, far more than we admit these days.   Advent is a great season to make some intentional time for it. 

To that end, you might notice in some of our area parishes during the Advent season some more silent times built into our Masses.   In the Roman Missal, the Church calls for there to be silence during the liturgy, though we often forget this.  There are supposed to be long, pregnant pauses.  There are supposed to be times when there is no music-  when we just sit.   These are times designed for contemplation of the mysteries we are encountering.  

If you experience some more silence in the Mass here and there in the days ahead, do not assume something is wrong, and do not flee from it.   The silence is medicine for our hyper lives.  It is God’s privileged zone of contact with each of us who are his children.   Advent is a great season to become re-acquainted with the gift of silence. 


Father Nathan