We can fix our attention on God. We do this with the help of what we call the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They left the Egyptian cities of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. to find and focus on God, in the desert. One of them, Arsenious, was praying to God this prayer: Lead me in the way of salvation. And he got this answer from God:

Flee, be silent, and pray always.

This became the spirituality of the desert:

Solitude

Silence

Prayer

These three words are the choice we can make to experience the light of this season.

Last week, we looked at solitude. We discovered that solitude is the desire—the attitude—to be with Christ and him alone. Another way of talking about solitude is to remember the image of Soren Kierkegaard, that unless we take the leap of faith into the arms of a loving God, we must settle for a life of distraction and despair.

How do we do that? With the help of silence. Silence is the discipline that allows solitude to happen. Now, I know this must sound strange. First of all, we live in a time when we want our religion, our spirituality, in the same way we want our food: fast and easy. We want to go to a spiritual drive-in, make an order, and pick it up in a few minutes. We just don’t have time for any spiritual
disciplines, least of all silence. I suspect the most successful preachers today are not the ones who ask the tough questions, but those who can package belief in a neat, tidy set of slogans. Second, have you noticed how little silence we can find in our lives? In many ways, we’re better off than we have ever been, but it is noisier than it has even been. The refrigerator keeps things fresh, but at a cost to silence; the dishwasher keeps our utensils clean, but it also requires noise. Cars require roads and the hum of tires on them, and roads create traffic, all at the cost of silence. Step into an elevator or a store, and there is background noise.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers were not only suspicious of noise, but of words. They took seriously the third chapter of the little book of James: you can tame a tiger but not a tongue. One of them, Arsenious, said that he frequently had to repent of something he said, but he had never had to repent of something unsaid.
Here are some words about words from Nenri Nouwen:

Recently I was driving through Los Angeles, and suddenly I had the strange sensation of driving through a huge dictionary. Wherever I looked there were words trying to take my eyes from the road. They said, Use me, take me, buy me, drink me, smell me, touch me, kiss me, sleep with me.

Words, the Desert Fathers and Mothers believed, kept human beings chained to this world; silence, they believed, lets us hear God’s voice and enter into his world.

To thrive, we can seek God and befriend silence this holiday season—or any season. What are some of the ways?

1. Today, during the prayers during this service, we are going to have five minutes of silence. Time to be with God. When we did it last week, a mother of two small children came up to me and said, Thanks. This is the only silence I’m going to get this week.

2. Find the time for some silence in your week. For a lot of people that is early in the morning when things haven’t gotten noisy. But for most of the week, we can create the silence in our heads and push out the sounds around us.

3. Create a little cell of your own. A cell is the place for a monk to have complete silence. You can create a cell of silence for yourself anywhere by repeating a piece of Scripture—The Lord is My Shepherd—over and over again to yourself and listening for the voice of God.

Solitude is the attitude that we want to be with Christ and him alone. That is done best in silence, pushing away the chains of our wordy world. Listen carefully, God may send you a word. Next
week, we look at prayer.

Amen.