Be Still and Know

The best advice I ever got came from one of the men I most respect. Dan Nuesch once put his hand on my shoulder and told me, "Carter, nunca pases por alto la oportunidad de estarte callado." This, roughly translated, would say, "Carter, never pass up the opportunity to keep quiet." Basically he was telling me to shut up!

Although I have always valued that lesson, I have not, I'm sorry to say, heeded it all that much. Yes, I am a bit of a conversationalist. Not even that. I am more of a lecturer. I talk (and talk and talk...) but it always turns into more of a monologue. I am a thinker, a poor one, but one nonetheless. So I think of what I want to say and plot it out and then expect people to be interested so I begin to talk. They aren't interested. They rarely are. Most people aren't. They expect a conversation, that is dialogue - not monologue!

Still it does suit my temperament quite a bit. I am a writer and so I am used to having one-sided communication. Also as a potential teacher I will be prone to have more monologue (lecture) sequences than any dialogue (conversation) sequences. Even so I must learn to listen. Other people have a lot to say. I must learn to discipline myself into listening those I love as well as those I don't love, well, at least not so easily.

Most of us talk too much. It is amazing how short Jesus' sayings are. When we pray, who does most of the talking? Is it the most important party to the conversation or the least important one? If we had the opportunity to converse with some great person, like Mother Teresa or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, would we want to do most of the talking, or would we want to listen most of the time? Why do we talk so much to God that we have no time to listen? How patient God must be, waiting until we get rid of all our mental and verbal noise and hoping that we do not then immediately turn from addressing him to addressing the world. In that split second of silence between the time we stop talking to God and start talking to the world, God gets more graces into us than at any other time outside the sacraments.

The above words by Peter Kreeft are reflective of the little heard of (and less practiced) spiritual discipline of silence (or solitude). It is of this discipline that someone once commented that when we turn music and other sounds off we can then finally begin to think.