God is a jealous God. He wants our complete attention dedicated to Him alone. But we can be distracted by everything and anything, by menial tasks or important endeavors.
Many distractions prevent us from adoring Christ our Lord. And in our freedom, He lets us opt for chores like Martha did. Nevertheless, He prefers we choose the better part like Mary, that is, to adore Him.
We should then strive to be in adoration, fighting distractions that pull us away from God. Cardinal Sarah, in his book “The Power of Silence”, discusses how silence is a powerful tool to listen to God.
But silence is not only the absence of noise in the sense of a noise that can be heard. Most of all, silence is the absence of anything that distracts us from adoring God, be it worries and fruitless thoughts or superfluous web searching and useless chatter, be it our job responsibilities (which must be fulfilled) or mere recreational activities (some of which we can forego).
These things can clutter our heart and mind, and confuse and weaken our will. Sometimes we take the path of trying to fix that clutter and forget to stop and adore. We can become experts at fixing problems but forget to stop to adore Christ, in order to find out His will for us precisely in His unique presence.
The idea is to find moments during the day we dedicate to adoring Christ. In addition, we can even pray for the grace of being able to have silence even in the midst of activities or even noise.
We know, then, that many things can overwhelm our mind and heart. But when Christ is the unique presence in our life, we can certainly find that peaceful silence that unclutters our soul. And we can find that silence, because God grants it to us as His special grace.
Our contribution for being in silence is desiring it, looking for it and praying for it. And God will grant that grace as He sees fit for each one of us: whenever, wherever and however He wishes. It could be abundant or scarce, “because from this rich spring flow many streams -- some large, others small, and also little puddles” (Saint Teresa of Jesus). But He gives each one what is best for our sanctification.
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