“Be silent and come out of him!”
“Be silent and come out of him!”
In our gospel today, the Lord commands the unclean spirit to be silent, that is, to listen to God. Indeed, silence leads to driving away the unclean spirit within us by the power of God’s power and presence. The unclean spirit that controls us is none other than ourselves. Not our true self, created in the image and likeness of God, but the deformed self that is greedy, dissatisfied, always demanding more… Only the authoritative voice of Jesus can silence and tame this unclean spirit within us and free us from our selfish selves so that we can be free to be true ourselves
Our Sunday worship gives us the opportunity to reflect or meditate, pause, to be silent and still, to refresh ourselves with God’s will in our own respective lives. Our weekend encounter with Christ in the Eucharist should literally silence us and make us more aware of His presence in our lives and of our mission to make His presence felt by people we deal with or we encounter during the week. Silence disposes us to prayer which is more about listening to God than telling Him about all our troubles which He would already know about anyway.
During our celebration of the Holy Mass, there are a number of designated times when the rubrics indicate that a moment of silence be observed: during the penitential rite, the opening prayer, after the first and second readings, after homily and after communion. We also spend some silence before and after the celebration. These designated moments of silence in our liturgy indicates its importance, if not its need, amidst the powerful words that we express and realize in our worship service.
St Thomas Aquinas refers to this kind of silence when he defines the evangelical vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as vacare Deo, which is translated in English as “vacancy for God”. To provide a vacancy for God is let our soul give room for God to influence our lifestyle, our schedules, our attitudes, our decisions and our life. This silence or vacancy for God is what filled Job in his months of emptiness and what sustained him in his nights of misery. It is this silence with God that made Paul endure through trials and tribulations.
Our silence with God would inspire us with our sense of direction, giving us an opportunity to listen to God’s inspiration and direction during occasional times of loss and confusion. As poetically stated, at cool of day with God we walk our garden’s grateful shade, we hear his voice among the trees and we are not afraid.
Let us pray to God to help us commit ourselves to spend more and more periodic silence or create a regular vacancy for Him in our respective lives: “Heavenly Father, create in us an emptiness for You in our rather busy and crowded life. Create a silence for You in our noisy schedules. Create a vacancy for You in our life that is so full of ourselves. We ask this through Christ who prayed to You for our unity with You and with one another. Amen.”