A Lovely Lenten Reflection from Reader David Rizzo

Here’s just a taste. Go to his Substack to read the whole thing:

Driving, Prayer and Finding God in Silence

I do some of my best thinking on my drive to work. Thoughts spin out of my head as my car leaves the driveway. With the relentless energy of a river after heavy rains this interior monologue continues unabated until I recognize that I’ve been swept out to sea with dry land nowhere in sight. I am so wrapped up in this flow of thoughts that I’ve not even noticed the landscape I’ve been driving through, the beauty of pine trees laden with snow on a cold February morning. Instead I saw only the loud, rushing torrent of thoughts, and missed the true gift that silence and attention bring.

This scenario has played out in my life many times, a relentless pursuit of thoughts instead of attention to what’s happening right before my eyes, and missing intangibles such as beauty, visceral experience like joy or even sheer terror when it comes. No, I had been paying attention to the noise of my thoughts instead of the silence that sits between the end of one thought and the beginning of the next.

For a long time I didn’t even know that there’s more than this barrage of interior self-talk, thinking about things rather than experiencing the ebb and flow from within the silent places. Later, this reality broke over me, that life can be viewed from the empty spaces around which the vortex swirled. And when it did, it felt like a coming home to what it was like when I was a young child. It was at this point that Jesus’ exhortation that we must become like young children1 began to make sense to me.

So how do we rediscover that inner refugia of silence, what poet Robert Bly2 may have been speaking of when he dreamt of:

...strange and dark treasures
 Not of gold or strange stones but the true
 Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota.

Robert Bly

One technique that has provided a key to unlock this gate for me is the cultivation of attention to the present moment. 

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By all means, do go and read the rest of it!