Catholic churches throughout the world tonight will conclude their evening Masses by going dark, lighting the candles, and singing Silent Night. It’s a display of beauty that prompts many people to choose to attend the vigil Mass for Christmas, even if it means waiting for a midnight start time.
In the midst of this beauty, this anticipation of the Savior, there are some quiet lessons that can be drawn for those in the midst of searching for a spouse.
The lesson of Silence.
Silence can be a painful thing. If you’ve been on CatholicMatch long enough and corresponded with enough people, you know the feeling of sending a message and waiting back for what seems to be an interminable amount of time for a reply. Maybe that wait time was only a day or two. But it seemed like forever. In large part because the wait was accompanied by uncertainty if the reply would ever come.
Those periods of radio silence can be harder during the holiday season. Everyone has commitments. People with kids have even more on their plate. That casual introductory note from someone in their CatholicMatch inbox starts to feel like something that can wait. Even if you’ve e-mailed two or three times, the connection might not be extensive enough to keep someone’s attention when life feels chaotic.
That leaves you in a form of silence. It’s a form of silence that can cut even deeper than normal because you might be in a family setting that’s filled with happy couples. Or you’re in a family setting that has you bored to tears and you’re just browsing CatholicMatch to keep from losing your mind. You know it’s unreasonable to be expecting replies from people but…you’re bored and you see those un-replied to messages in your sent file.
And, it grinds away at you.
The silence can be damaging. Not just because it hurts in the moment, but because it can have damaging mental effects. When we “chase” short-term gains, so to speak, and then keep repeatedly checking on what we know is true, it builds resentment toward whomever is not fulfilling what we want (in this case, the person we wrote).
We know it makes no sense. It’s just a natural consequence of staying bogged down and chasing the mental stimulation that will come with a reply. Chasing this type of virtual “noise” can also reorientate our mind in ways that prevent us from seeing this healthiest path to pursue.
If the above paragraph sounds like it was written by someone who’s spent way too much time hitting the refresh button on everything from CatholicMatch to Facebook to personal email…well, yes, I’m guilty. And even though I’m now happily married, I still chase “noise” on social platforms far more than I should.
Instead of pursuing mental stimulation, let’s instead change our focus to pursuing the silence.
One of many passages in St. Faustina Kowalska’s Divine Mercy Diary that extols the value of silence teaches us this:
“Silence is a sword in the spiritual struggle. A talkative soul will never attain sanctity. The sword of silence will cut off everything that would like to cling to the soul. We are sensitive to words and quickly want to answer back, without taking any regard as to whether it is God's will that we should speak (477).”
St. Faustina is talking in the context of normal conversation. But it has lessons that can apply to the virtual world where CatholicMatch connections are made. The things that “cling to the soul” for us can be attachments that are preventing us from being the best possible spouse. Or maybe from even seeing that there’s a different path out there, one that will eventually lead us to the person that we’ll be happy with.
Silence can be like surgery, cutting away those attachments that make us unhappy.
Silence can be cathartic, orientating us toward a new and better path. Silence can be that powerful. In fact, the great cardinal from Africa, Robert Sarah, wrote an entire book, The Power of Silence, to teach us this. Cardinal Sarah even called noise a “dictatorship.”
Powerful words. But not nearly as powerful as silence. What better time to embrace the silence that comes with the anticipation of the Savior on Christmas Eve?
