I can see clearly now

[contemplative]

I can see clearly now.

For days, weeks, months and years I have been commiserating about all of the news stories, books, movies and sometimes my own real life experiences that have reflected badly on the Catholic Church. I don’t need to itemize them here. So many of you reading this are already all too familiar with what I am talking about.

Tonight I see more clearly. These obstacles that many of us face are just that….obstacles. These obstacles can all be prayed around, over, under and through. I can get past them. I need to focus on God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. That is it. I can see through those obstacles and be with my God. Nothing can get in the way.

So no matter what is happening in my personal life, my parish life, my community, my diocese, my CAForum world, my world………I can see God through it all. I won’t let ‘things’ or ‘circumstances’ get in my way of finding the love of God.

It is time to ….be a little more silent……allow the sound of God to come through.

Music is just noise when there are no rests. Add silent pauses to sound and you will have meaning. Add silent pauses to your life and you will hear God. God speaks to us in the silence of our hearts. Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)

There will always be trouble to hear….and trouble to talk about. Let the noise ‘be’…. take time and pray and be still and God will show the right way to go.

 

[jimmy]

contemplative:

Music is just noise without rests. Add silent pauses to sound and you will have meaning. Add silent pauses to your life and you will hear God. God speaks to us in the silence of our hearts. Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)

There will always be trouble to hear….and trouble to talk about. Let the noise ‘be’…. take time and pray and be still and God will show the right way to go.

God was in the “Still small voice” in Kings. Silence is necesary in life.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

That is a wonderful post!

My piano teacher always reminded me that the pauses were just as vital to the music as the sounds.

Silence, nothingness, blankness seems meaningless to us, but it is the canvas the masterpiece called Creation was painted.

If we can learn to appreciate nothing (and in contemplative terms, “become as nothing”) then we will have everything.

Alan

 

[Melanie01]

What a thought filled post.:clapping:

Silence is always golden, but non-silence is beautiful too even if it underscores the profundity of quietness.

Does that make sense

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Melanie01:

What a thought filled post.:clapping:

Silence is always golden, but non-silence is beautiful too even if it underscores the profundity of quietness.

Does that make sense

It does to me. Try listening to the first ten seconds of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and you will hear some profound silence going on, dramatically interspersed with some fairly aggressive sound. Neglect the importance of either, and you lose everything.

Without contrast, the earth would have no form. God created it by separating formless “stuff” or whatever into divisions. He separated light from dark, land from sea, sky from earth, etc.

If you get out a big enough microscope, you will find that the “stuff” human beings are made up of is not mostly water, but mostly space between subatomic “particles.” Even then, we think the particles are not particles at all, but structures in themselves.

In other words, even the “solid” objects we see are really not solid at all, depending on your point of view. When I worked in supply line at Bell Labs, with computer chips so small, we actually have to worry about “soft errors” in memory chips, which “randomly” cause computer glitches, attributed usually to cosmic rays and/or manufacturing defects. There are particles that come from the sun and travel straight through the earth without even hardly slowing down. They do that not because they have enough energy to plow through the earth, but because they are small and they just go through the gaps, essentially not even noticing they just traveled through the earth. They don’t notice because they didn’t bump into anything because there is much more “space” inside the earth than there is “matter.” Maybe Newton didn’t know all that, but it was still true.

Thus the philosophical discussion of whether the universe is made of “massive stuff” or more like “form and information” with practically no “stuff” at all. Einstein even discovered that “stuff” and energy are really the same thing in two different forms, leading to nuclear power and of course the atomic bomb. In a way you could look at the world as being a bunch of nothingness, with a bunch of force fields and imaginary structures that look solid but aren’t.

Back on a more academic example, for some time electrical engineers such as myself look at photons and even electrons sometimes as either waves or particles. The physics and the mathematics are completely different, and many argue one over the other. Fact is, if you are engineer like me and are interested more in exploiting the properties of nature rather than discover their full truth, then you use whichever formula is easiest to apply because either one will get you the right answer. If I’m building led displays for your car radio, I think of photons both as particles and waves, because having that flexibility in my toolbox makes the math easier. It’s kind of like saying that a “geocentric” view of the universe may be irrefutable, but the math is sometimes easier if we pretend the earth really revolves about the sun instead of the other way around.

Alan