February 2, 2025
I’ve been struggling lately with what to listen to and what not to listen to. What to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Last week in the Liturgy of the Hours this passage jumped out at me, from Isaiah. Who can live with “the consuming fire?” the speaker asks, and then answers:
He who practices virtue and speaks honestly,
who spurns what is gained by oppression,
stopping his ears lest he hear of bloodshed,
closing his eyes lest he look on evil . . .
He shall dwell on the heights,
his stronghold shall be a rocky fastness. (Isaiah 33:13-16)
Stopping my ears. Closing my eyes. That’s what I’ve been doing the last few months, like quite a few others I know: not reading the news, not watching the news, not listening to any news. Not paying attention.
I just can’t handle the constant jolts of it anymore, the shots of adrenaline whenever I see a headline. I can only take so much of my own outrage. “I get all the news I need from the weather report,” as Paul Simon sang years ago.
Sometimes it’s been sunny. More often it’s rained. It’s been quiet. Winter has been proceeding. Spring is not far away.
And yet one of the biggest problems we have right now is people who don’t know the facts and don’t want to know, or who have the wrong facts and are fine with that, or who don’t know what’s going on and don’t think we can know. That’s one of the reasons we’ve ended up in the situation we’re in. How can we act rightly when we practice willful ignorance?
Is that what I’m doing? When is silence and withdrawal a good and proper thing, a way of praying, of following where the Spirit is leading us, and when is it refusing to face reality?
Am I dwelling on the heights, in a rocky fastness, or am I sticking my head in the sand?
I know that sooner or later I’m going to have to come out of the woods and click on the news and decide what I will say and how I will act. “Whatever you do for the least of these,” Jesus says in Matthew, “you do for me” (25:40). It couldn’t be clearer.
But I wonder, too, how much difference it’s made for me not to know what’s been going on. What has been the detriment? What have I lost? What have I failed to do?
I know the gain: a greater centeredness. A sense of ordinariness. Of presence.
Is there someone I could have helped and didn’t? I’m not sure.
When Jesus approaches the house where a young girl has died, he ignores all the “commotion,” Mark says, and goes in, quietly, and heals her. He raises her up. “Rise, little girl,” he says. “Rise.” (Mark 5:21-43)
Isn’t prayer itself an act? Isn’t silence? “With every creative thought or action,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.” Doesn’t prayer make a difference, too, however invisible? However small?
Satan tempts Jesus in the desert by saying three times it’s not good enough to be in the desert, not good enough just to be walking around for forty days all alone. He has to make stuff happen: turn rocks into bread. Stand on top of the parapet and make his power known to the world.
Jesus says no. Rocks are enough. Wind is enough. The stars in the night sky.