Quiet

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” (Victor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”).

Trust in Jesus (Younsung Kim)

There is a lot to be said about being able to be quiet.

So often I say things that I later regret because in a fit of anger or frustration or even just a bit of a foul mood, I find myself saying things that I would not otherwise say if only I have managed to keep control of my tongue and my senses a little better…

Mostly, this is just a bad habit now.  Mostly, it is not that I am trying to be offensive, but rather that I am out of practice at NOT being offensive.  Perhaps this is the great heroism of the Saints?  After all, the Saints are able to achieve great feats of self-control.  Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta spent her senior years physically working among the poor.  She was able to discipline herself to ensure she was not only available to assist, but also that she remained kind and patient with each person to whom she ministered.  I am sure there were days when her old bones ached and she was tired of the sights and the smells and the general hopelessness of poverty.  And she wrote about her weariness at length in her letters to her spiritual advisors over the years.  And despite this terrible overwhelming feeling of trauma and suffering, she managed to remain hopeful with others and cheerful.  She had the discipline to smile despite all number of uncertainties and terrible atrocities that she witnessed.

I have been thinking about this.  You see, Saint Mother Teresa is not the only Saint.  Others also had great discipline.  It is said that Saint Andrew welcomed the Cross, when he was martyred…  “Long have I waited” are the words attributed to him when he was shown the cross upon which he was to be hung.  There is a discipline in being able to wait for that cross and being able to accept it no matter what.  And there he was – able to do that.

And when I think of discipline, it is not acquired in a day or a week or even a month or year.  It takes a great deal of practice in the virtue of discipline to ensure that we are able to act in the way that we should be acting in when the time is right for that.

And that means that it is critically important for me to learn how to be quiet. For, it is in the silence that I am able to control my response.

There is a best selling book, written by Victor Frankl, who was a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust during the Second World War – a Jewish Psychiatrist – who was a prisoner during the war and lost his entire family and many of his friends as a result of that terrible atrocity.  In the book, Frankl writes, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

And I have been thinking about that today.  For it seems to me that there is a great deal of space that I am using up.  And today, it seems quite clear that another word for space is simply – quiet…

And what a blessing it would be to be a little quiet from time to time…