By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
I have never had much desire to celebrate the arrival of a new year. To me it’s the most meaningless of all holidays. Maybe it’s because I can’t understand why anyone would celebrate the start of a new tax-filing season.
But something is different this time. Something new has been in the air for a while. I’ve alluded to it before, most recently in letters to you on Dec. 3 and Dec. 10. I thought I knew what big choice lay ahead but it turns out I had only a glimmer of it. God has presented me with a big choice that’s nothing like the one I had in mind.
When you confront a choice that God presents you perceive it initially with a little uneasiness. “Nah, that can’t be God. Don’t be ridiculous,” you say to yourself.
But then you start throwing the idea around in your mind – savoring it like the first taste of a rare wine. “Well, maybe,” is your next reaction. And the more intoxicating it becomes the more you surrender to it.
I have been a writer for way more than half my life, starting with the brand-new newspaper at my junior high school and lasting beyond my retirement from journalism in 2005, through my time recruiting students for a Catholic college, and into the weekly FAVS experience.
I have written on deadline most of my life. My latest challenge came just a few days ago when I volunteered to help my pastor with a last-minute pulpit statement involving a major survey to be undertaken in our parish that hopefully will guide us in planning our future rather than just letting it happen. His secretary was stunned when I provided a draft within two hours, but then I reminded her that I was trained to write on tight deadlines. It’s what I do.
Until now.
This is the last SpokaneFAVS letter I’m writing on a weekly deadline. The timing is poetic, considering that this letter is being published on the last day of 2015. From now on I will write to you only when I want to share something with you that’s special, meaningful or moving to me. That’s the way letters used to be written, back when people sat down with pen in hand to write a letter that the postman delivered a week later.
My goal with every letter has been to express how I deal with life, in the hope that you can manage your life-dealings a little more easily. Like those good old days, I want each letter to be my way of communicating with a friend. And I hope that’s the way you have received these notes over the past 16 months.
But as any journalist will tell you the great downside of writing on deadline is that a deadline demands that you produce, whether it feels special or not. And there comes a point when I can’t be pithy or meaningful with you, my friend, simply because a deadline demands it.
The great internal demand I feel right now is for silence. Pure, undefiled, peaceful, undemanding silence. I have never had a period of such silence in my life. There was a time when silence was intimidating, foreboding, threatening, because I was nourished solely by what my mind absorbed and thought. In recent years silence has become much more of a friend – a condition to be savored – because I realize I simply cannot think my way through life or understand it on my own terms.
You and I are much more than simply what we do. And reality is much greater than what we perceive. Right now I need to learn more about myself and reality from the one who knows me best. Silence creates the space where I can hear God. And only by hearing God can I find something worth sharing with you about myself and reality.God is not imposing silence on me. He’s not demanding that I shut up. He’s not telling me I’ve wasted my time because, as friends have pointed out, I don’t know who has been positively affected by what they’ve read in this space. He’s simply saying he’d like more time with me and shown me that I need more time with him.
But God isn’t merely challenging me to be quiet and listen. I believe this is his challenge to you, too – his challenge to make 2016 a truly new year by doing something truly new.
I hope my choice will prompt you to consider wading into silence – the stream of life that’s more about being and less about doing. Silence is as good for you as it is for me because that’s when you can hear God better, too.
All God’s blessings – Mark
