M

M is for Magnificat.

Indeed, my soul does magnify the Lord! He has permitted me to ramble on for one thousand posts, as I stumble through trying to discern His word in my life. Yes, I have my hobby horses and many may accuse me of tilting at windmills. Yes, I have been filled with intellectual pride and not enough compassion for my fellow men and women. To have the platform to speak my mind to an audience which could be very large, yet is actually quite tiny, is a privilege, and one that, to my shame, I often forget.

The fact of the matter is that the world is now full of competing voices. For every little blog like this, there is another uttering blasphemies against the great God in Heaven, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Every time I preach the Catholic Faith, another Christian will accuse Catholics of being party with the Whore of Babylon. Whatever, I say, someone will unsay it.

So how is Christianity to preach its word in Babel?

If the world is full of words, then perhaps the most appropriate voice of the Church in response will be silence. The world demands answers and signs from Our Lord and He withholds those answers because they do not come from those who are seeking Him, they come from those who would denounce.

I have been very lucky. The size of my blog means that I don't get trolls. Perhaps that's more of an indictment against me: Our Lord suffered from trolls; the Church suffers from trolls. However, the appropriate response to trolls is precisely that which Our Lord gives, namely the Sign of Jonah - His Death and Resurrection. These events lie beyond words.

A blog without words would defeat its object, but a Christian blog should encourage us to go beyond words to the Word which cannot be uttered by a human mouth but only by God the Father. Christianity needs to point to silence so that the one who truly seeks Christ Jesus is compelled by that desire to find Him to sit down, shut up, and listen.

We can do nothing about the message and counter-message that is broadcast over the internet, but we can choose how to allow what we read to draw us into our closet and shut the door in order to hear a word that does not fall upon the ears of the flesh but on the ears of the soul. Even in solitude, our ears are crowded with the babble of our own thoughts. The skill we need to acquire is to hear them but not listen to them.

If the world does not want to hear the message of Love that comes from God, then it has the choice not to listen. If it seeks to silence that voice by force, then it will only succeed in rendering itself completely deaf to God and the song of the angels. That silence with cacophony is Hell itself. The Christian cultivates silence in cacophony.

We cannot forget the true war that is being waged not between men (the war is never truly with men) but between the will of the flesh and the will of the spirit. The silence in Heaven after the seventh seal leads to the blasts of the seven trumpets. This war is won by God in Christ, and the silence of Christians will make those trumpet blasts penetrate this world until Evil is conquered and our joy is made complete.

Then we sing ever more loudly, "My soul doth magnify the Lord!"