Adoremus

Who has not known unrequited love? Who has not known what it feels like to long for even a few seconds of undivided attention from the person on whom we are fixated in body, mind and spirit? Unrequited love can take years to heal, whether or not the two people spend all or part of their life together, which often happens.

The Nativity of Christ: Gerard van Honthorst

Believing that there is total complementarity of soul between oneself and the object of one’s desire is, on the whole, a delusion. There may be complementarity but it can never be total. That belongs with someone quite different. The idea of another being in any way a ‘twin soul’ leads to the greatest expectations or, worse still, assumptions, with which come the greatest disillusions and the most searing pain.

Then there is the other kind of pain, the pain of guilt and shame associated with being loved by someone whose affections we cannot return. The guilt and shame are felt most acutely if we have wronged the person in question. There are other feelings too, ranging from mild irritation to fearing for one’s life in an age of online violence. Insofar as the recipient of unrequited love has actively fed the other’s obsession, being the object of another’s fantasy comes with being unable to love the other person with the passionate intensity they feel for us. Whichever side of the ‘love, love me not’ equation you are on, psychological damage is almost inevitable for at least a period of time. But it has ever been thus, even before the advent of social media. 

All of this is a very inadequate encapsulation of what happens in the arena of love between two human beings. It applies to all human relationships and not only to ‘romantic’ ones. There are an infinite number of nuanced variations to this simple scenario. All of them involve pain and risk – however they end up.

Into this seemingly unbreakable cycle of pain and exultation comes the Christ Child, the incarnation of Love itself. The holy Child comes not simply to show us how love should be, which he does, of course, but to be in love with us, in every sense. This means that the Incarnate Word of Love enters into the unloved or unloving heart of every human being on earth and honours their loving, as he redeems their inability to return love – in whatever circumstances love is needed.

This is not a theory, anymore than talking about the pain and shame of unrequited love is a theory. Unrequited love happens, as most of us know, sometimes more than once in a lifetime. It is often first experienced in childhood. Whatever the circumstances, unrequited love can lead to hopelessness and despair, to a person’s heart closing to the possibility of loving or being loved, because they are afraid of the pain it will cause them, and perhaps also afraid of its joys.

The coming of the Christ Child obliges the hitherto impossible to happen in hearts grown cold. There is a momentary relinquishing of a person’s grip on their own closedness, on the tightness of a heart that has been hurt beyond the possibility of it ever being healed. The moment of relinquishing occurs in the split second of their allowing their attention to fall on the holy Child without perhaps having meant for that to happen. They are not religious. They are caught unawares and find themselves loving without meaning to and, for some inexplicable reason, do not allow themselves the usual safety precaution of ‘shutting down’.

Love only needs a split second to get in. The split second is as real as any other moment in the passage of time, or of any one lifetime. But it is also eternity. It is that second, perhaps only known at the moment of death itself, when a person knows that whatever has been is past and that they are held in Love itself. Then comes a realisation of the primary purpose for which they, and all of us, have been made which is to respond to Love’s invitation, to worship and adore this impossible, seemingly insignificant Child, as did the shepherds and the kings.

In Such Times

The worst politics and the greatest abuses of power invite the best satire. The best satire endures and ultimately finds its place alongside other classics of the English language, or of another language – French comes to mind. It is also honoured among the visual or theatre arts. The best satire is always metaphor or parable. It is also often courageous, although not necessarily beautiful to either read or behold. In fact, its primary purpose and virtue lies in not being pleasing or restful to the mind’s eye, or to what might be called the collective conscience. It exists to challenge and disturb.

Satire must challenge the senses by forcing the reader or viewer to contemplate the consequences of the folly of the times and of the crass stupidity of rulers, as well as of those who either support or benefit directly from their power. But even the best satire will eventually be archived. Times change, seldom for the better.

Parables and metaphors, on the other hand, tend to endure. Their meaning is not locked in to a given set of circumstances, or to any particular time. They are universal. Parables are especially so because they inevitably return us to the great mystery of life itself, bound as it is to relationships which shape and define the history of families and nations. The parables and metaphors of scripture were recorded and written down with this idea in mind.

The root of the word ‘religion’ is ligare meaning to ‘bind together’.  How we ultimately interpret the underlying meaning of religion affects how we live our lives and how power is exercised, how those who hold it know themselves as accountable to the author of all life. Do they exercise power in order to suppress? Or to liberate? Do they bind people through fear? Or liberate them through bonds created in love and held together in trust, trust which makes for civilised society? There is ultimately no getting away from religion when it is understood in this sense of binding together, so we abuse its metaphors and parables to our cost. One way of abusing them is to read them with an a priori agenda or a pre-formed mindset.

Pre-formed mindsets encompass a range of religious and political agendas, often blending or converging in the minds of those who support them. With world chaos and climate change comes, for example, a renewed preoccupation with ‘end times’, or with a focus on a particular nation or group of people who can be hated, or perhaps feared, or with promises of total economic renewal paralleled by an equally all consuming promise of religious renewal. Both have in the recent and more distant past proved to be damaging delusions. Hitler promised re-forestation and wholesale renewal of an ailing infrastructure. Trump also promises the renewal of an ailing infrastructure, along with work and prosperity for all, but beginning with those to whom he owes the most political favours. Innumerable emotional and psychological casualties resulted from the so-called Toronto Blessing, the result of the almost aphrodisiacal power experienced by some of its leaders and proponents at the time.

Added to this, a pre-formed mindset seldom moves those who hold it in a forward direction, even though it requires great energy and commitment to sustain it. A pre-formed mindset corresponds to a car’s wheels spinning in the sand. Its energy derives from desperation, an ever greater determination to hold on to delusion, often in order to maintain a grip on power, to the point that power itself becomes delusional. As a result, those who think they hold it lose their grip on reality, resulting in dangerous paranoia, such as we are beginning to see in Mr. Trump.

Such delusional determination works as much in the arena of politics as it does in religion, the two becoming at times almost indistinguishable. Think of North Korea’s particular brand of Emperor worship.  It also leads to religious and political sectarianism. The growing number of neo-Nazi rallies in Europe and America manifest a form of religious sectarianism, different only in the intensity of its hatred from any other kind of mass religious gathering.

All of this suggests that, among other things, an informed approach to the religions of the world, beginning with their scriptures, is essential to global stability. With stability comes peace and a fair distribution of wealth. This would include the basic infrastructures needed for all to benefit from the kind of entrepreneurship which leads to economic growth. Taken together, the things that bind us together in both a religious and political sense require wisdom as it is understood in the scriptures.

The proper interpretation of the scriptures, and of the bible in particular, is essential for the maintaining of a reciprocal wisdom in the sphere of religion and politics, as is the truthful recording and interpretation of events by a free and morally accountable media, and with a sense of history. The question with which we begin, therefore, is ‘Are things worse than they ever were? Or do we just know more?’ from which follows ‘is it enough to know without entering into the process of healing and making whole?’These questions pertain very much to how we view the future of the planet and the kind of lives our children and grandchildren will lead.

Somewhere embedded in these anxious questions also lies a deep yearning for the kind of wisdom which only comes with knowing and being known by a loving God. The knowing is in the yearning itself. We have a God who yearns with us, while being all powerful. This is a God who entrusts us with sufficient knowledge to overcome the evil and heal the brokenness of our world and society. He does not delegate. He entrusts. To leaders, whether political or religious, God also entrusts a certain power, and with it accountability. Again, he does not delegate..

That power is modelled and given in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It is sourced in him and finds its wisdom and purpose in him. Our own anxiety is also held in him and, in those moments where we are prepared to meet his gaze, taken into his ongoing life and into his love for the world. No power, in heaven or on earth, will separate us from that love or diminish his power to save the world from its self-inflicted destruction. 

The Power

Source: newrepublic.com

It is a kind of iconoclasm – the phalanx of suited men striding into the inner sanctum of freedom and democracy, its leader’s all too familiar jowl defiantly set. There are shades of the grim triumphant moments which augured so much ill for the free world in the early part of the last century. And in the background a super moon prompting other kinds of fears in the hearts of those whose religion risks dissolving into something like superstition – or could they be right perhaps? Added to signs, portents and Halloween is a toxic mixture of hatred in its various manifestations now legitimised (whatever he may say ‘to camera’)  by America’s billionaire celebrity President Elect. What are we to make of all this?

We are to shape hope out of common sense and right remembering, since this is also the season of remembrance. There are lessons to be learned from remembering the years which immediately preceded the last super moon. Realising that we have yet to learn from them means that it is not altogether too late. For one thing, we are being reminded that the legitimate voice of the oppressed and marginalised, especially when it goes unheeded for too long, will make itself heard through legitimate channels by the most dangerous means available to it. Or rather, it will allow itself to be used by the political opportunist wanting raw power.

Many will believe that the people have indeed spoken, when all that has happened is that their legitimate grievances, and the worst of human nature, have ‘morphed’ into one another and then been taken over by a man who wants only to win. One note of hope is that the existing democratic system will make it impossible for him to fully realise his most damaging ambitions in the longer term.

Another note of hope comes this Sunday. Many Christians will be keeping it as the Feast of Christ the King. One of the gospel readings tells us of Christ’s brief exchange with Pontius Pilate who is a weak leader desperate to hold on to power by trying to please all on whom his power depends. Pilate does not know what to do. He is very much afraid of the voice of the people. They have the power to accuse him of treason. They would have been a mixed lot, although mostly Christ’s own people who are now baying for his blood, the blood of Christ and possibly that of Pilate as well. Pilate must please them or his position, if not his life, will be in jeopardy, so he asks Jesus to give him a lead:  “What have you done?” The tone is urgent, even desperate.

The answer is silence, apart from a few short remarks, one pertaining to the nature and source of power itself and another to the nature of real authority. Jesus tells Pilate that real power comes from God. Real power is completely free because it is sustained, as well as given, by God alone in love and in trust. Pilate does not have real power, because he is at the mercy of the people’s voice, and he knows this.

The really powerful person knows that power has only been entrusted to them for the greater good of those they are there to serve. They will be accountable before God for what they have done with this power, as well as for how they have acquired it. All this would have been deeply unsettling for the Roman Procurator, as it would be for Donald Trump were he to have a similar conversation with Jesus today.

Jesus spoke of his purpose which was to ‘testify to the truth’. Words like ‘truth’ as it pertains to authority, are foreign to people like Pilate and Trump. It is not the language they speak. Authority comes with speaking and acting truthfully. It comes with integrity. Integrity implies singleness of loving purpose. We see no evidence of such a purpose in a power-hungry and emotionally unstable plutocrat.  We therefore discern no true authority in him.

Furthermore, the kind of power Jesus is talking about pertains to a different kind of world. In that world, that ‘kingdom’, if there is no true authority, there is no real power. So far, we have seen nothing of true authority in Mr. Trump or in any of his aides or supporters. But this does not mean that he does not have the power to wreak irreparable damage on our planet and on the world as we know it. But we are not to give up on this world, or on the kingdom of which Jesus speaks.

True authority is integral to the truth which is born of the love of God who is the source of all power. No wonder Pilate asks, sardonically, and again desperately, “What is ‘truth’?” The power of truth, and the authority it bestows, lies in sacrificial self-giving love. For those who hold it, power’s most disturbing and defining moment comes when they must acknowledge the truth about themselves in relation to the power entrusted to them, a power which may not sit well with the authority they believe they are exercising. Pilate knew this in the moment of his exchange with Jesus Christ. When will such a moment of truth occur for President Elect Donald Trump?

Honour-Bound

When it comes to deciding the future of nations, thinking ought to be a heart and mind

Source: fox11online.com

business, rather than a matter of gut feeling. Gut feeling has nothing to do with the mind and little with what is true and honest in the human heart. Gut feeling is emotional short term reactivism. When it is pandered to as a means to acquiring power it yields toxic results. Gut feeling licenses duplicity and it is gut feeling which is currently driving the American election. It is also shaping the news, because there is nothing else to shape it in regard to this election. 

In terms of the two candidates left in the ring, one of them is prevented from saying anything for which a person could conceivably vote. The other majors on people’s ‘gut feeling’. Gut feeling, especially in this highly personalised electoral conflict amounts to a celebration and further promotion of all that is least attractive, intelligent or desirable in human beings. At present, there seems to be no end to the dark tunnel this is taking us all into. The endless celebration of what is least honourable in human beings results, I think, in something like what we used to call Hell.  

A collective ignorance of history leads, as we know, to its being repeated. Gut feeling is all we have left on which to base world-changing decisions when we have not paused to make connections with the past. The most significant of these could be described as the political and religious extremes which feed on gut feeling and lead, often very quickly, to the worst kind of megalomaniac autocracy. Nero and Hitler spring to mind. Both, in their different ways, were popular with their people. Both owed much to gut feeling.

The question we are left with, then, is how can a nation be at its best when all it has to go on for its political decision-making is gut feeling which leads to damaging and highly contentious short-term decisions? I would suggest the revival of the idea of honour.

By honour I do not mean that which is associated with rank or prestige. I mean the kind of honour which, in the poetic tradition of courtly love, equates with courtesy. There is nothing shallow or short-lived about honour, or courtesy. In fact courtesy is one of the attributes of God. 

The 12^th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, spoke of Christ as her ‘courteous Lord’. Honour, as it pertains to courtesy, has to do with principled love, love which is both of the mind and heart, love whose principle lies in a willingness to sacrifice itself for the good of those it loves. We are not seeing very much of this in the two Presidential candidates, but perhaps it is alot to ask of two people who are fighting each other to the death by fair means or foul – most often foul.

Courtesy pertains to self-sacrificial dying, as does the traditional notion of honour when honour is enacted in love. ‘Honour’ killing is therefore an evil distortion of the meaning of that word. Evil is always a distortion of the good and we are seeing quite a bit of distortion of the good in this election.  Where lies and half lies masquerade as truth we have evil in the making. Where the worst in human nature is manipulated in a thinly disguised appeal for raw power, we have the raw material of corruption. But it is never too late for light to overcome even this particular darkness.

The sign of light overcoming darkness begins in what is known in scripture as ‘the scandal of the Cross’. The current US election has majored on scandal. Perhaps in the aftermath of this no-win situation, when the nation begins to heal from the damage it  has done to itself, it will regret the passing of one who served it honourably in his leadership, and with unfailing courtesy.  Perhaps it will learn for the future that we get the leaders we deserve. 

Aloneness

Source: twitter.com

‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the once popular ad. Today, its haunting ambiguity lingers on, inviting reflection on the sociality of the human condition, or the lack of it. Can we, or should we, seek to be alone? Does being alone invariably mean we are lonely? Or is being alone our natural state? After all, we are born alone and we ultimately die alone. In the moment of death we return to that primal moment of separation from whatever it is that we have come from, both physical and spiritual. The last sound we make in this life will be an echo of the primal cry of birth, a cry of protest shaped by desire for something left behind, for some other being. We protest in the face of our aloneness in death as in birth.

To be alone is not necessarily to be lonely, although it is often thought of in that way. To be truly alone is to embrace solitude. Solitude is necessary for human health whereas loneliness destroys the human spirit.

To experience loneliness, a person needs to have known what it is to be left to themselves before they have come to know their true self, as can happen with rejection in childhood. The abandoned child will have left a great part of themselves in the place from which they have been banished and perhaps with the person who has rejected them. Bereavement in early childhood can also be felt as abandonment or rejection, leaving that person feeling inwardly naked and often angry.  Lonely people are vulnerable because they go through life in a state of inner nakedness – as naked souls, perhaps.

Loneliness is never chosen. But solitude must be chosen and then learned. It is a free choice. Unlike loneliness, it does not impose itself and it never cheats those who embrace it. It never cheats them of the joy it promises. It is always its own reward.

Making the jump from aloneness, and the loneliness associated with it, to the kind of solitude in which life gestates and yields creativity in the true sense of the word is not something achieved through will power. Neither can we try to effect solitude, because we are curious to know what it is like to experience some sort of higher spiritual state. Solitude is not about being in a higher state. It is about acceptance of the present moment in the full knowledge that it is as it is, and in the expectation that it is also something deeper and greater. Solitude allows the moment to be inhabited by Love itself, a Love which re-clothes us in the nakedness of our loneliness.

Since solitude is not chosen and yet never fails to deliver what it promises, it is essential that a person simultaneously seeks and waits for solitude to come to them, that they wait for it to happen. This is a question of disponibilité, to borrow from the French philosopher Simone Weil. To be disponible is to be fully available, permanently ‘on call’ to the one who promises. It is a state of mind and heart which can take a lifetime to reach, especially if a person has experienced real loneliness and depression. For one thing, someone who has known the kind of loneliness which comes with emotional banishment is often distrustful of what might seem to be a ‘self help’ method for depression, especially if there is a religious tinge to it. They do not trust religion or its methods. Depression is, among other things, an acute state of vulnerability and abandonment, possibly including a sense of having been abandoned by God.

Re-generative and transforming solitude does not come about through self-enforced loneliness, in the belief that we are dealing with our depression without the need for outside help. It comes about as a gift in its own right. It is the antidote to the causes of depression, although it will not cure depression itself. Depression, we are learning, is a chemical disorder as much as an emotional one and needs to be treated accordingly.

The gift which comes with solitude simply makes it possible for the one suffering from depression, and the loneliness it brings, to step outside that particular state of mind and view it objectively as something other than themselves. Their true self remains inviolate waiting for the gift which solitude brings. So solitude involves being available to having something given to us which is both unconditional and life-transforming.

Solitude changes the way we see things and people. It places them within a wider framework, one which can usefully be seen as having been constructed around them, like a picture surrounded by a frame. This conceptual framework contains us, and our situation in regard to them, as it would a painting. It allows us to see things as they are in the general scheme of things. When we see a person in that ordered context it sometimes becomes possible to meet them in a new and different way and hence to forgive them if we need to.

 People who have hurt us are not integral to who we are. Neither are they part of our loneliness. They exist on their own. They have their particular pain and responsibilities in regard to themselves and others. The gift which comes with solitude makes it possible for us to see such people objectively, and eventually to forgive them without feeling that in so doing we have allowed them to expose us once again in our naked vulnerability.

Instead, we are vulnerable to Love itself, which is not the same thing as saying that we become prey to our emotions, seeing ourselves and others through the mist of our own indulgent tears. The riches of solitude are the riches of Love incarnate, love which is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, hard, tough and resilient. It is love as we see and know it in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Goodness

Yesterday, I was told about a sudden and unexpected family

'The Lady in the Van' Independent.co.uk

reconciliation. It stayed with me all day. Later, I watched the early evening news and then an excellent film, The Lady in the Van – Maggi Smith at her best. The film was about goodness, as was my friend’s story. Both were good news in the fullest sense. They held, or contained, the events of the day. They held them together.

My friend’s story was a quiet interruption of the treadmill rhythm of world events, the continual downward thrust of life. The same is true of the story about the man who took in the van lady, in the film – and also in real life. Both are an interruption of the normal course of events. In each of these situations something good is working into the less good aspects of human nature, and thus of life as we know it.

This good must be energised by something or someone, in order for it to work. Something must enliven it, like the goodness of the created world, whatever scientists may say about the universe creating itself out of nothing. Goodness is not a created thing. It simply is. It works in the immediacy of the moment.

Something that works must have a purpose. Goodness is worked as love, which is its purpose. This is not to say that it has demonstrable reasons for working, especially in situations where goodness seems unwarranted and therefore incomprehensible to most of us. The neighbours in the film, all good people in their way, did not know how to respond to unwarranted goodness, goodness which goes beyond ‘doing the right thing’.

Goodness proceeds from something, or someone, greater than the person who is doing good to someone else. It effects a transformation. A single good act done without duplicity, or kind word spoken sincerely, effects permanent change, even if its permanence seems hard to believe in at times. Its effect does not even depend on another person’s willingness to receive it. Neither does it wait on gratitude. It is unconditional.  Goodness, or caring, as Alan Bennet tells the social worker, is about dirt, to put it politely. Or, as seems the case with the family I was told about, something which comes under the heading of revelation, a moment of truth or understanding about the way things really are.

This suggests that goodness derives from some form of original truth. Something is given which enables someone to recognise that another person or situation is in need of unalloyed goodness.  Recognising this need can take a person unawares. It effects change in the most cynical mindset. Perhaps goodness, and the change it effects in both giver and receiver, has to do with prevenient grace, the goodness lying dormant in people, the God-shaped space in their inner being.

Perhaps the good person understands at depth the reality of that grace, or re-creative goodness, which also lies waiting in the mind or heart of the suffering or angry person. They sense that it is there, waiting to be touched into life and transformed by the author of all goodness, through whatever they are about to do or say to that person.

At the same time, the purpose of any good act or kind word can also be obscured by the sometimes pre-conceived view of the person saying it. Good people are not always likeable – think of the whisky priest in Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory. Good people seldom think of themselves as good, especially when being good takes them way over their tolerance threshold for ‘doing the right thing’.

The purpose of goodness is to bring ‘life in all its fullness’ to others, or to awaken them to what they are missing when grace, as it is sourced in Love, is refused or ignored. This was the purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Authority of Silence

A political vacuum is dangerous. In the context of the American elections, the vacuum is not simply an empty space waiting to be filled by the person most adept at grabbing power. It is an empty space waiting to be filled by whatever that person is. Presidents are generally

source: blogs.wsj.com

remembered more for what they were than for what they did. Political power, especially in America, depends to a great extent on personal charisma and the chimera it projects and, as we are seeing in the current election debates, chimera, rather than considered argument, produces instantaneous, if short-lived, effects on an audience which wants to believe what it has been persuaded that it is seeing on the podium – not who it is really seeing. The power hungry persona fuses with the face of that person as potential leader, so that it is hard to tell the difference between the two. This is why many of us are willing the American people not to succumb to the momentary and ephemeral taste of power at the cost of making a politically inexperienced narcissist the most powerful person on earth – which is what he dreams of becoming.

To will something to the good is not a purely mental discipline, if only for the fact that no single individual or group has that kind of ‘will’ power. It is also the reason why so much that passes for faith healing, and which ends in failure or is proved to be fraudulent, is confused with the kind of ‘willing’ which we call prayer, and which transforms people or transfigures the way things are seen by all interested parties. This is the kind of transformation and enlightened vision which we urgently need to take effect in the politics of today, in America and elsewhere, and it is the duty of every person of faith to enter into this work.

The transformation of politics, in both secular and religious contexts, will come about not by concentration of the mind but by our becoming the means for God’s grace to inhabit the political and spiritual vacuums of these times. We do this by being fully present to God in our own emptiness. Our emptiness is not a vacuum. It is the stillness of our inner silence in which we know God.

Stillness and inner silence enable us to be present and attentive to the American presidential election, to all the people caught up in the debates, to the rhetoric which both enmeshes and confuses them, to the duplicity and sheer nastiness of politics in both the world and the Church, and to where we may sense a possibility for goodness. It is about allowing all these things to inhabit our inner space without allowing them to overwhelm us.

Our inner space is the default position to which we return moment by moment in the waking day, and it is where we meet Christ. We are not overwhelmed by the people and situations which we draw into this space because the abiding Spirit of Christ is already there to meet them. Our task is simply to return them to him.

The task of returning brings with it a certain authority, which is not the same as power. Power disfigures the human heart and blinds all possible vision because it is driven by human greed and egocentricity. It is something to be taken, often from others. Unlike power, true authority is never grasped or clung to. It is always given. Those who receive authority will relinquish it if the Giver requires it to be returned. Hence, true authority is always exercised in open handed, and open hearted, freedom. The people who have true authority will often be seen as a threat to those who simply want power.

In the moment of ‘returning’ ourselves and others to the Christ who inhabits our inner space, we are given authority to enter into the work of peace building. So ‘returning’ is  crucial to halting the global turmoil which we are currently witnessing and to ultimately transforming it. To return does not mean to escape from. We do not return to our own private space and hide from the world. Our space belongs to all who suffer or are deluded by the blandishments of those who want power over them. In the moment of returning to Christ we are also returning to him the victims of the powerful, including those we ourselves may have victimised if we have been powerful. The moment of returning others to Christ is a moment of the most profound love any human being is capable of. It is a moment of transformative grace.

This is why the word ‘return’ is also used to mean repentance. When we ‘return’ the politics of North America, or the war in Syria, or the horrific abuse of women both at home and abroad, to our inner space, we are repenting with them, for their situation and on their behalf.  In our inner silent space, and for this ‘returning’ to be possible, we are given the authority to work simultaneously on multiple time trajectories, the present moment, the immediate and historic past, the immediate future in which a child’s life may be hanging in the balance in a bombed out hospital in Aleppo, and the longer term future of the world and of the Church, both historic and eternal. On all these time planes we are given the authority to enter into God’s own transformative work, provided we do not allow our inner silence to be overwhelmed by the noise of a world in turmoil.