For many years, I thought it seemed boring to have faith. There didn’t seem much shine to it, unless you watch some of the more charismatic preachers who go to great lengths to make it appear like a performance art, but then it becomes ridiculous. I thought the struggle of life was the fun, only to find out that everyone clawing their way up the hill is silently miserable. Miley Cyrus’s song “It’s the Climb” makes me shudder as she instructs people to believe that the clawing and scratching on the slippery teflon hill is the way. No, Miley, I’m sorry: “It’s the Slide.”

"Faith will tell me Christ is present when my human senses fail." That’s a statement I believe, but the senses do have their moments. Three things tell me God is present. Silence can suggest to me that God is present. Words can make me believe. In both of these, hearing is the sense that can make me believe in the invisible. Silence is often the best way to hear. When there is no silence, I can go to silence in the “chapel of the heart.” When I’m in the world, among all its noises, I can often hear God’s love in a voice, a song, a sermon, or even reading text. I can hear. Hearing is the only sense that can really prove God’s presence to me, with seeing being a fine complementary sense, as the “argument from beauty” may not prove God’s existence, but it sure does when you are watching a sunrise or hearing a baby laugh or beholding a giant oak tree or seeing a deer or fox in the wild. But hearing can touch reason and faith all at the same time, through prose or verse, from sermon or song, and even spoken words. I can “hear” by reading, too. When you hear the words that move you, they cut you to the quick. The truth shuts out all of the nonsense, if only for a moment, and the yearning and struggle suddenly makes sense.

In any given day I can flip the triangle over the wrong way. When I remember to turn it back into a bowl, then I can slide down into the center again, if only for a bit, to the place where I can turn toward God. All of the busy noise disappears for a bit. The things that cause hurt or anxiety, perceived or real, no longer matter when you are in the center. The word of God strikes at the center of you and resonates. The notion that faith is boring becomes preposterous. Life without faith becomes a far more boring existence. The empty life is that of constant struggle. The life without meaning is the one that climbs without ever resting. That life without faith is the one that must “do something” and never stops to pray. When you hear the right words, and you turn to God, there is nothing so exciting in your entire life because you have the cheat code to understanding while retaining the mystery itself. You can revel in the mystery, as suddenly the center is not so far away. But you can only reach that center and stay there if you let go of yourself.  

A few years ago, I discovered some hard questions that needed to be asked. The death of ego is a difficult thing, and I’ll probably never keep it down for more than an hour at a time. Some of those questions were as follows:

How much silence did I have, or could I have had if I had turned off the phone in my pocket? Did any of the time I spent in the past year bring the world’s troubles to an end? Does anything that I do today give me control over problems that are already unleashed across the world? Does anyone seriously think we will eradicate all that we dislike? How much time spent worrying have I wasted? How many nights sitting up with anxiety have I spent over this past year? Did I spend the day angry and frustrated or did I let go of control and offer it up to God?

Most of us wasted this year's opportunity. For most of us told to stay home during the pandemic, who were not in health care jobs, that time was a gift squandered. To hear, to listen, and understand what was missing in our lives. Most of us just continued more of the same things we did before the pandemic, that is, “doing something,” without realizing that the great gap in time offered us a chance for reflection and change. Most of us heard nothing in the silence because we sought out the noise of the busy world of social media, especially in America, as political turmoil and elections drowned out a glorious silence. Alongside that, excessive buying and selling of hot tubs and cars and houses and appliances consumed us. These consumer things, these material things, they consume us, our time, our value, our worth. As the saying goes, the things you own end up owning you. Then there was the drinking and eating to excess, or conversely the furious diet and exercise in response to previous overindulgences. This yo-yo of thinness and obesity happens to so many of us that we might just consider walking on a treadmill while we simultaneously shovel Oreo cookies and ice cream into our faces. We may have changed our pursuits and wants in the pandemic, but many of us traded one unfulfilling desire for another. The best things in life are free. There are very few things that are free, but they are there: prayer is one of those things. Will it change the world? Maybe not. But will it change you? Without a doubt.  

I will say the pandemic opened up a listening post for me, like I was given a chance to climb to a cliff overlooking a valley that contained the world. And I could look down and see the world, and when I shouted down into the abyss I would only hear the echo of myself, nonsense, nothing, just my own voice coming back to me in a weaker form. My voice, thrown down into the valley of the world, could do nothing but either be drowned out or be bounced around the rocky walls before returning to me as a pathetic powerless echo. Or, instead, on that cliff I could turn my head upward, I could look upward, toward heaven and without opening my mouth, in silence, there I could hear everything. Suddenly, everything, as if I had found the Aleph from Jorge Luis Borges short story, where he saw infinity from standing in a certain spot in the cellar of an old house that was about to be demolished. He wrote something that sounds nearly Biblical: “I shut my eyes - I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph…”

“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished.”

Borges and William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman and Dostoyevsky were all writers that seemed to have found that spot where they could see much of the world all at once, and then even past the world (although Whitman could only see himself, which explains much in our present age of disbelief in God in favor of ourselves). These writers could articulate the world in ways that most people can understand but not put into words. But where the writer is looking makes a big difference. Whitman took us in the wrong direction, looking in the mirror for his meaning and muse, instead of looking to heaven. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, was able to see the worldly and otherworldly perspectives.

But this gift isn’t only available to writers or artists. In fact, the more education you receive, the less you may be able to see beyond this world. Artists may be special in their ability to articulate this infinite place, but everyone can go there. A painter or writer is not needed to experience the same thing, as no artist can capture what each person can feel and know in their own experience of reason and faith. The great philosophers often become famous for recording ideas that have bounced around in most people’s heads at one time or another, and their fame is for spelling out the idea in official jargon. Everyone has the gift, and philosophers and artists can only attempt to reproduce it, and they never do it justice in their drawing or writing. The most un-artistic person in history has access to God, because they can come to rest in the nest of the presence of the Trinity.

“God’s kingdom lies within you…You must turn to him, the Lord, with all your heart, and leave this wretched world behind you, if your soul is to find rest.…you must make room, deep in your heart…it is for the inward eye, all the splendour and beauty of him; deep in your heart is where he likes to be. Where he finds a man whose thoughts go deep, he is a frequent visitor…if you really direct your gaze inwards, and rid yourself of uncontrolled affections, then you can turn to God at will, lifted out of yourself by an impulse of the spirit, and rest in him contentedly.” (Book II, The Imitation of Christ)

This is available to every person, and knowledge or skill has nothing to do with finding this place.

The Sign of the Cross represents this perfectly, as God is above, in heaven, Jesus came here, to earth, and the Holy Spirit enters and fills your heart. In fact, the Sign of the Cross by itself can be an amazing prayer, said slowly, as you contemplate God above, using your intellect and will, your reason and faith, and then to your heart, to the son, to Jesus, who shows us how to live, you can imagine him sitting next to you or in front of you as you pray and know that he came to earth as one of us and knew every suffering plight and struggle that we do, and lastly, moving across your chest, you can request the Holy Spirit to come and be with you, as Jesus promised, that he would not leave us orphaned, that we would have the Advocate, the presence of God, the third person of the Trinity, here with us always. All of that from the Sign of the Cross, that short sacramental that we rush through so we can start another prayer. Slow down - that motion is a prayer all by itself, and maybe one of the best.

The great questions have an answer when you turn away from the world. The world doesn't have the answers. Once I realized that silence and listening was a possibility, I realized that I could find the quiet whether I was alone or in a crowd. The silence is always available, even when standing among a hundred other souls. When you turn away from the world toward God, what is happening around you no longer matters.

I was facing the wrong direction. For most of my life, I was facing the world, facing the crowd, seeing the action and the excitement as attractive, when it was more like a pit of entrapment. Only in listening did I come to hear the Word, and understand what “The Word” actually meant. Three ways of listening helped me. 1.) Through silence and listening to God, 2.) through spending time with faithful Christians who live their faith, and 3.) by reading, by contemplating, and by being moved and challenged by the four Gospel accounts.

In seeking, I came to accept the mysteries and see their power. There was meaning in there that I had glossed and skipped right over, of a depth far beyond any pagan myth or scientific fact. Then in the Sacraments of the Church I saw the invisible become visible. Sacredness became real again. To me that was a miracle all by itself. You won’t understand what I mean unless you have lost all sense of what is sacred or never believed it in the first place, and then suddenly the Sacred shows up as real you cannot be the same person.

There was the end of competition, too. There was Jesus. In the center of all this was Jesus, waiting for me to wake up and notice him, to recognize his sacrifice and his risen glory. I’m reminded of James Joyce’s description of the artist, “…the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Jesus is seated - he is sitting - next to God. He is there, always. He has already done the work, taking on the sins of the world, and has been tortured and killed for us. Yet most of us aren't even bothering to look up to him because we are so fixated on our own pride and schemes in life. Jesus is resting, not jumping around, not yearning for your favorite football team on Sunday, not willing you to choose the right diet. He is seated, next to the living God, hearing our prayers, until he comes again. Perhaps he is paring his fingernails, as Joyce guessed, although that seems a bit too specific an action, but I understand what he means. God is love, and he is at peace.

Unless I can get to the middle of the triangle between the points of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and indifference, I can’t see the light of faith. If I flip my perspective, make the turn, repent, then I may get to that center. But I often easily drift past the place or turn back to myself completely and suddenly begin struggling once again. Sometimes I cannot hold my position for long, but knowing that center is there, where the turn can be made, means I have to strive not for the world, but to turn away from the world.

Like Peter and James and John in the garden, I could not stay awake for one hour with Jesus. For two decades, I could not stay awake for one hour. I could not hear either. I was deaf. I could not understand what his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension meant until one day, suddenly I could. The dominoes fell one by one, with finality, as I listened and learned from the Gospels all over again the life of Jesus, along with powerful words from ancient writers like St. Augustine and modern speakers like Robert Barron and Mike Schmitz and Fulton Sheen and Scott Hahn and Tim Keller. The more I ask, the more I seek, and the more I knock, the more the door opens. “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” I find this to be true. I can flip the world over, and easily, gently, roll back into the center.

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