Sept. 6, 2009: 23rd Sunday Ordinary (B)
Tuesday this week I was reminiscing about what happened a year before. As the Hurricane Gustav barreled down our way, I was with Fr. Burns and Fr. Blanchard at St. Aloysius rectory, huddled around the TV with our iPhones constantly updating us about the latest news. (I was assigned to St. Aloysius as the associate pastor at that time) Within few hours of landfall, all the lights went out and all we heard was eerie wind gusts that toppled trees onto our parish office building. Later in that afternoon we saw how horrendous the damage was to the entire neighborhood. The next morning, we debated whether to celebrate daily mass at 8AM. We did. We positioned a small table underneath a skylight and placed 10 chairs around the table. And we waited. We had more than 10 people show up. It was a very intimate and quiet mass. We read the Gospel on how the disciples were caught in a fearful storm in the sea and Jesus commanded the storm to quiet down; the disciples learned that no matter how turbulent the storm raged, they were to trust and have faith in Jesus who were with them through it all.
That evening as I sat near the tabernacle and the stained glasses with a
flashlight to pray the evening prayer, I was struck by the flickering light of the sanctuary candle. This light flickered brightly despite the power outage.
And it was the only light shining for those walking on the Stuart Avenue which faced the church. It took a great power outage to notice that Jesus was with us all along. All other times, with the bright street lights and with our busy lives driving our cars with one hand and answering our cell phone on the other, we didn't notice that weak, flickering light shone through the stained glasses. It's strange; He was there all along, but we didn't notice Him. I wonder if He has been speaking to us all along; I wonder if we were too deaf to hear Him speaking to us.
In contrast with the great silence of the power outage, the next day, everyone in the neighborhood was out with their loud blowers cleaning up debris. I wanted to be useful, so I too grabbed a blower out of the storage and pointed the blower on a heavy pile of leaves on our driveway. I pushed the button, and nothing happened. Is this thing broke, I asked myself. I unplugged it from the wall and plugged it to another outlet. Still nothing. I unplugged it again and plugged it around the building, and still nothing happened. Fr. Burns looking at me with a puzzled frown said, "Paul, what are you doing?" Then, my engineering common sense came back--the power was out in the neighborhood.
How many of you actually enjoyed the silence that Gustav forced upon us? When the battery on my iPhone went out, I actually grabbed a book that I have not read for a long time. I spent more time praying, and I was keenly aware of Jesus' presence during the days of silence. It's strange. We have many things stuck to our ears these days to listen--e.g. iPod headphone, Bluetooth headset, cell phones. Yet we are deaf to one of the most important sound--the voice of Jesus. When Jesus cried out “Ephphatha! a deaf man's ears were opened. As the First Reading says, "Here is your God...he comes to save you...Then...the ears of the deaf be cleared..." If "ephphatha" is the Hebrew word for "be opened," then for our generation, "silence" is our word for "be opened my ears for the voice of Jesus."
Have any of you seen the documentary called, "Into Great Silence"? It came out as DVD on a couple of years ago. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip
Gröning wrote to seek permission from the Carthusian order to make a documentary about them. Nestled deep in the French Alps, the Grande Chartreuse is considered one of the world's most ascetic monasteries. Sixteen years later they were ready for him. Gröning lived in the monks' quarters for six months filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions. There was no film crew, no artificial lights, no special interviews—just Gröning recording the monks’ life on his handheld camera. The result is a very special insight into life in another world, one that draws you in through its daily routine and through a profoundly deep stillness.
A Carthusian monk seeks God in solitude on three levels: separation from the world, life in his cell, and inner solitude, or “solitude of the heart”. They basically receive no visitors and have neither radio nor television. The superior informs them about what is going on in the world. This provides the necessary conditions for fostering silence. In the silence monks hear the voice of Jesus speaking to them.
One blind Carthusian monk in the documentary made a profound statement. "It is a pity that the world has lost all sense of God. They have no reason to live any
more. When you abolish the thought of God, why should you go on living on this earth?" It's strange. Here is a blind man who has lost the sense of seeing, yet he is telling us that we have lost all sense of God. How can we regain that sense of God? How can we have our deaf ears be opened to God's voice? Mother Teresa has a suggestion. She says,
