Tuning Out the Noise
Our pastor was eloquent and vulnerable last week, sharing how the stress of leading a congregation can be hard. He confessed self-medicating with too many Dove bars, too many videos on YouTube. But Fr. John also shared that in those moments, he was trying to check himself, to become more aware of what was happening internally, and turn to the Lord in prayer. If we can do that, he suggested, we will find that God is there, ready to love us and lift us up.
Today the scriptures pose a similar invitation. What habits, emotions, and distractions are we putting in God’s way? Instead of inviting us to take on the light yoke, today the invitation is about becoming fertile soil. Today the question is how can we cast aside whatever is making us shallow, stony, choked.
The Gospel says that our experience of the word of God is like seeds falling on different kinds of soil. Some seeds fall on a well-trodden path, where the birds are able to eat it quickly, just as there are people who hear the word but don’t understand, and the devil is able to easily lead them astray. Then there are seeds falling on rocky soil, where the roots will inevitably be shallow, just as there are people who receive the word, but, as soon as persecution and challenges come, they drift away. There are also seeds that fall among thorns, so that they are choked and never bear fruit, just like worldly anxieties and luxuries choke so many of us. Finally, Jesus says, there is the rich soil, which bears fruit and yields thirty, sixty, a hundred times over, pointing to what can happen when we listen to the word, take steps to understand it, and then embody it in our habits and choices.
So what keeps us from being that fertile soil? What are the things that make us shallow and stony, that make us anxious and thorny? These distractions, habits, sins, addictions, grudges, desires, fears, the things we hold tightly out of pride, the stories we tell ourselves to put the blame on others – these tendencies can vary from person to person, but we all have them, and it’s important to have enough self-awareness to know our demons and recognize our own temptations before they choke our spirits. What is holding us back from prayer, honest confession, and turning to the Lord?
On Friday night, my family watched an episode of The Chosen in which Mary Magdalene sees a few things that upset her and remind her of her past. She crumbles at the stress, and she returns to some of the old bars and back alleys where she used to associate with unsavory characters. She goes on a bender, until she’s so ashamed that she bolts from the bar. But she’s gone so deep into the dross, she’s so embarrassed by what she has done, that once she's stepped out of her sin, all she can do is sit in paralyzed silence in a corner of a courtyard. She wants to go back to Jesus, but she’s afraid. She has faith in him, but not in herself. She needs other disciples to encourage her to come back, to help her look at Jesus’s face again. It’s difficult and excruciating watching her summon the courage to apologize, but of course, once she does, it’s beautiful, and the look of love in Jesus’s eyes is one she’ll never forget. The scene reminded me that in our own day, the priest is in persona Christi just as much in confession as he is at the Mass, and I think most priests will agree that the sacrament of reconciliation is one of the joys of their vocation.
But deliberate sins aren’t the only things that block our path, that make us stony or shallow soil. Sometimes it can be ordinary habits and structures that we hardly notice. A colleague at work mentioned recently that the summer slowdown has helped her realize how much ordinary life sucks away her time to pray, making her more shallow. I was nodding, recognizing that danger in my own life too. It reminded me of CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, where the devil explains that he hates music but he loves noise. There’s a little section in one of the letters where the devil aspires to make the whole world as noisy as hell, so that any spiritual nudges or noble aspirations that people might feel get drowned out. And of course, Screwtape does use audible noise to make us deaf and dull, but he also means all the distractions, all the media and images and that compete for our attention.
It’s also worth noticing how today’s scriptures are bursting with God’s presence and action in creation. There is a balm in the natural world where we can escape from the noise. Today Isaiah talks about the rain and the snow watering the earth, making it fruitful, the seed springing up and eventually yielding bread. Our Psalm describes God’s faithfulness to his people in terms of rain drenching the furrows, of overflowing harvests, of hills and meadows, and fields full of flocks. Today’s epistle talks about creation groaning, as we await the redemption of our bodies. Then of course we have today’s parable about seeds and fertility. God is coming to us every day in creation with a massive exuberance. And yet - here is me, spending most of my days at a desk, with a computer, and how many of my off hours staring into a screen. It’s bad for my back, bad for my weight, and bad for my soul. When Romans talks about the redemption of our bodies, it means something better and more beautiful than my way of life. Relatedly, one of my daughters told me recently that she’s never seen the Milky Way. That’s partly a problem with the structure and incentives of modern life - light pollution - but showing my daughter the Milky Way is also a debt that I owe her as a dad. Part of parenting is being alert to the ways modern society can steal the innocence from our children, to help our children find respite from the noise, and, in my case, to share the Milky Way.
I think summer time is a good time to do something about all of this, not only to escape the noise and reclaim the place of creation in our spiritual life, but to slow down generally, to step back from whatever is making us shallow, to cultivate what will make us fertile. From our scriptures to our sacraments, from the corporal works of mercy to our sexual ethics, the Catholic faith is always calling us back to embodiment, back to contact with the real, the natural, the God-given. Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si is but one example of this. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, is flowing from the same place. The invitation is always to dial back from our pride, our entitlement, and tune into the still small voice, the quiet rhythm and beauty underneath all things, and become that rich soil where the word of God can take root.
