We have all we need {on silence}

This piece spoke to  me today. I type it here to share with you but also to imprint it on my heart and mind. 



"There are some people whom God takes and sets apart.

There are others he leaves among the crowds, people he does no "withdraw from the world."

These are the people who have an ordinary job, an ordinary household, or an ordinary celibacy. People with ordinary sicknesses, and ordinary times of grieving. People with an ordinary house, and ordinary clothes. These are the people of ordinary life. The people we might meet on the street.

The love the door that opens onto the street, just as their brothers who are hidden from the world love the door that shuts behind them forever.

We, the ordinary people of the streets, believe with all our might that this street, this world, where God has placed us, is our place of holiness.

We believe that we lack nothing here that we need. If we needed something else, God would already have given it to us.

We do not need to find silence; we already have it. The day we lack silence is the day we have not learned how to keep it.

All the noises around us cause much less disturbance than we ourselves do.

The real noise is the echo things make within us. It is not necessarily talking that breaks the silence. Silence is the place whee the Word of God dwells; if we limit ourselves to repeating this word, then we can speak without ceasing to be silent.

Monasteries appear to be the place of praise and the place of silence that praise requires.

In the street, crushed by the crowd, we make our souls into so many caves of silence wherein the Word of God can dwell and resound.

In those crowds marked by the sins of hatred, lust, and drunkenness, we find a desert of silence, and we recollect ourselves here with great ease, so that God can ring out his name: Vox clamans in deserto."

-Servant of God Madeleine Delbrel