New Year, new possibilities.
As much as I like the start of a New Year and the possibilities it brings, I
don’t like how quickly the calendar fills with commitments, sometimes to the
point of leaving no room to be still. I can only blame myself and my inability
to say no, added to my tendency to fill any extra hours to capacity.
As I begin to mark
my calendar this New Year, I want to make certain to include time to retreat
and climb a mountain. Jesus taught us to retreat, to go up to a mountain top
and find time alone to pray. “But he would withdraw to deserted places to
pray.” Luke 5:16
Finding time to be
alone is one of the reasons I enjoy camping and hiking. In past years I've had
the grace to climb some incredible mountains – Mount Sinai in Egypt, Machu
Picchu in Peru, Mount Rose in Nevada. Reaching the summit was challenging but
the view of God’s creation and the silence was worth each strained muscle. Not
only did each hike help me slow my pace, each helped me set aside distractions
from my day-to-day routine. The hikes helped me pay attention, to take in the
view. The long climbs also gave me time to think and to pray.
Granted, we do not
have any mountains in the Rio Grande Valley, but we can set aside time to claim
our own space, our metaphorical mountains, to sit in prayer and silence with
God. One of my favorite spaces is in my backyard porch, either early in the
morning before anyone wakes up or midmornings on weekends when I can sit and
listen to the wind playing with the leaves.
While advances in
technology have helped us become more efficient, it feels like all the latest
gadgets also serve to keep us on a leash around the clock. Not only are we
connected 24 hours a day, information streams in from all directions, making it
a noisy world to navigate. Sometimes we have to disconnect, make time to be
still, to go on a retreat, even if for a few minutes. Silence, solitude, and
space help us become better listeners. In our noisy world, given all our
distractions, how can we respond to what God is calling us to if we are not
attentive to his direction?
“When messages and
information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish
what is important from what is insignificant or secondary,” said Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI in his message for World Communications Day in 2012. “Deeper
reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight
seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it
possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic
body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an
appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just
equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.”
Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI also said, “Silence is an integral element of communication; in
its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able
to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth;
we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect
from others; and we choose how to express ourselves.”
Pope Francis
reminds us as well, “In the history of salvation, neither in the clamor nor in
the blatant, but the shadows and the silence are the places in which God chose
to reveal himself to humankind.”
The Annotations to
the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, note “the more our soul
finds itself alone and isolated, the more apt it makes itself to approach and
to reach its Creator and Lord, and the more it so approaches him, the more it
disposes itself to receive graces and gifts from his Divine and Sovereign
Goodness.”
There are different
ways to disconnect, different spaces for prayer and silence – hiking outdoors,
participating in a contemplative prayer group, signing up for retreat,
Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, or taking time to garden. Each of us
has to find our own mountain where we can retreat to in this New Year. So instead of making New Year’s resolutions,
this year I am going to focus on scheduling time on my calendar to slow my pace
and climb a mountain.
(Originally
published in January 2015 edition of The Valley Catholic newspaper)
