“The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.” – Thomas Merton.

We have little control over our lives in a turbulent world, we have complete control of the way we view our lives. Spirituality is one of the greatest gifts to me, it has taken me out of my self-absorbed dramas and give me a way to look at the world.

It is in the silence of the world that I have come to find myself and understand the glory of being alive.

Yesterday, a friend called up to lament the raging storm. “I just wish this winter would end,” he said, “it is so cold and I am so sick of shoveling snow.” Not too many people love a snowstorm, I think, and it is my secret that I do.

I am coming to see that this is one of the reasons I sometimes struggle so much with the torrent of voices on the Internet, it drowns out the silence in my head at times. And also brings me gifts, as it did today. Some people hear voices in their head, I hear silence in my head, and it is always disturbing to people.

I had been commiserating with people about the coming storm all day Tuesday, wherever I went. People warned me to be safe, predicted great fury and trouble, and pled with me to stay warm and keep inside. My utility send a message urging older men with heart disease to say indoors.

I said nothing to my friend, and wished him luck in the storm, and then I remembered our donkeys, who can hear the snow coming and who take themselves into our sheltered barn and wait for it, as in prayer.

I went out to the barn, and the donkeys, as always were dry and silent, they had been waiting for the storm and were dry and at peace when it came. They heard it hours earlier. I wrote about this, and this morning, a message from Mary Elaine Kiener who introduced me to a song her church choir sang this past Sunday morning, that “continues to ring in my heart.”

It’s called “In The Silence,” and you can hear it on youtube, it was written by Jacob Narverud. Living in the country, where I see the storm clouds rush over the bright stars, I have always gone outside to pray to the storm, and welcome the silence it brings, there is no silence quite like it.

Storms can trouble people, and cause hardship, but they bring a silence I can only describe as sacred. It rang in my heart when I read it, and I’m happy to pass it along.

“Give Me

Give me this life.

Give me this life, too.

That I may hear you,

blessed world.

That I may hear your secret life.

That I may breathe the unknown air.

That I may hear this snow as it nears.

That I may hear the snow as it kisses the earth.

And find peace in the silence of this world.”

“In The Silence, by Jacob Narverud.

Thanks for sending me this poem, Mary. In the next storm, I will take it out to the donkeys and read it to them. And sing it to the storm.

“When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love; and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.”

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude.