The Money-Changers

Man will not be content to drive away the money-changers from the temple of his soul until he realizes that it is a Holy of Holies.

OK, I probably would not have called this site “The Silent Life” if I did not intend to address the subject of silence once in a while. I hate noise, both external and internal. We live in the middle of the woods where it is often quite peaceful and still. I have come to think a lot about what is noise and what is not. First, let us de-emphasize the notion of noise we can hear with our ears. I’m not here to promote monastic observances of silence…although the human voice can be one of the noisiest, most cacaphonous sounds in all creation, especially our own. Most of us do not live in monasteries, and most of us have little control over the roar of our everyday lives. It can be deafening.

To me, a bird singing outside my window or the air soughing through the trees is not noise. Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is not noise. On the other hand, the headlines pulsing quietly off my computer screen, Oil Prices Skyrocket, Iran Test-Fires Missiles, Market Down Again, sound like trains colliding. That is internal noise. Even without such stimulation, our minds graciously present us with our own mental movies; and most of the time they are just useless, godless, energy-sucking, anxiety-producing junk. Worse still, this kind of noise is often harder to escape than the daily assault upon our ears.

That is, if we even try to escape. Most of us have become so anesthetized to the everyday din that we scarcely notice it. We’re like sponges, passive, soaking it all in from without and from within, oblivious to the corrosion it’s causing in our souls. We are deaf, yet still listening for the voice of God.

Only when we begin to observe interior silence, can we begin to pray as God intended. Only in this silence can we begin to know our true nature. Only in silence can we begin to know God. The works of Thomas Merton are replete with references to silence. In his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Merton quotes the writer, Julien Green: “Religion is not understood. Those who wish themselves pious, in order to admire themselves in this state, are made stupid by religion. What is needed is to lose ourselves completely in God; what is needed is perfect silence, supernatural silence. Pious talk has something revolting about it.”

To Eckhart Tolle observing external silence promotes stillness within. “The Unmanifested is present in the world as silence. This is why it has been said that nothing in the world is so like God as silence.”[1]

Father Raoul Plus observed that “man will not be content to drive away the money-changers from the temple of his soul until he realizes that it is a Holy of Holies – not a house of traffic, but in very truth the house of God.”[2] Once we realize this, we can begin the practice of interior silence; and only after we begin that can we begin the practice of the presence of God.

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[1] The Power of Now.

[2] How to Pray Always