Noise: An Enemy of Every Christian

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Welcome to episode 23 of the Catholic Frequency Podcast. Just a reminder, you can sign up for our free newsletter, and once a week, we'll send you a short devotional reflection. You can sign up at catholicfrequency.com.

Well, throughout the centuries, many enemies have risen up in opposition to the Catholic church. The church has always been in a relentless struggle with very powerful enemies. In our modern age, it's secularism, modernism, Marxism, Freemasonry, radical feminism, relativism, the sexual revolution, materialism, new age spirituality, the culture of death. There's so many more, of course. But these ideologies oppose Catholic teaching.

Secularism. Let's start there. The idea of secularism is to banish God from public life, reducing faith to a private matter. Secularism seeks to deny the church's role in shaping society, and the church has a role in shaping society. But the secularists don't wanna hear it. They are promoting a world where morality is dictated by human desire rather than by God's law.

Another subversive ideology we fight is modernism. It undermines the timeless truths of the Catholic faith, and it suggests that the truth evolves with culture. Modernism rejects the unchanging nature of God's revelation, and it causes many to question the foundations of our faith.

Marxism is a very powerful enemy of the church. With its materialist worldview, it denies the spiritual dimensions of life, and it pits class against class, fostering division and hatred while rejecting the cause church for justice rooted in charity and the dignity of the human person.

Freemasonry, though often cloaked in secrecy, promotes a naturalistic religion opposed to the supernatural grace of Christ. It seeks to replace the church's authority with its own, and it has undermined the faith of many.

In the twentieth century, radical feminism rose as an ideology, and it distorts the god given complementarity of men and women, rejecting the beauty of motherhood and the family. It often fosters anger and division rather than the unity and love Christ calls us to.

Then there's relativism. Relativism denies the existence of absolute truth, claiming all beliefs are equally valid. It erodes the church's mission to proclaim the gospel, leaving souls adrift in a sea of confusion and moral ambiguity.

Consumerism is another enemy of every Christian. When we fall into materialism, it causes us to value our own worth based on what we possess, and this fosters greed and discontent. It distracts the soul from eternal truths, and it traps us in a cycle of temporary satisfaction and spiritual emptiness.

Six decades ago, the sexual revolution exploded in our culture, and since then, it shattered the sacredness of human sexuality, promoting a culture of lust, objectification, and broken families. It rejects the church's teaching on chastity, marriage, and the dignity of the human body.

Although some people don't see it as a danger, new age spirituality certainly is because it lures many away from the truth of Christ, offering a self centered spirituality devoid of the cross. It rejects the need for redemption and the unique salvific role of the Catholic church.

The culture of death manifested in abortion, euthanasia, and attacks on the family, denying the sanctity of life from conception to natural death. This culture directly opposes the church's mission to protect the vulnerable and uphold the gospel of life.

Now these ideologies all are enemies of the church. They put souls in danger. But today, I wanna focus on something that perhaps you've never thought of as an enemy of the spiritual life or the church itself, and that is noise.

In 2016, cardinal Robert Sarr wrote a book about this, and he had a lot to say. The book that he wrote, Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. I'd like to share a rather lengthy quote from the book that really captures the sort of the essence of his entire line of thinking throughout the whole book.

Our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking at a devastating speed and volume in order to say nothing. Modern civilization does not know how to be quiet. It holds forth in an unending monologue. Postmodern society rejects the past and looks at the present as a cheap consumer object. It pictures the future in terms of an almost obsessive progress. Its dream, which has become a sad reality, will have been to lock silence away in a damp, dark dungeon.

Thus, there is a dictatorship of speech, a dictatorship of verbal emphasis. In this theater of shadows, nothing is left but a purulent wound of mechanical words without perspective, without truth, and without foundation. Quite often, quote, truth is nothing more than the pure and misleading creation of the media corroborated by fabricated images and testimonies.

When that happens, the word of God fades away, inaccessible, inaudible. Postmodernity is an ongoing offense and aggression against the divine silence. From morning to evening, from evening to morning, silence no longer has any place at all. The noise tries to prevent god himself from speaking.

In this hell of noise, man disintegrates and is lost. He is broken up into countless worries, fantasies, and fears. In order to get out of these depressing tunnels, he desperately awaits noise so that it will bring him a few consolations. Noise is a deceptive, addictive, and false tranquilizer.

The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of a senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to. Encounter, wonder, and kneeling before god.

Even in the schools, silence has disappeared. And yet, how can anyone study in the midst of noise? How can you read in noise? How can you train your intellect in noise? How can you structure your thought and the contours of your interior being in noise? How can you be open to the mystery of god, to spiritual values, and to our human greatness in continual turmoil?

Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world. That quote is in Cardinal Saar's book, Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise.

You see what he's getting at. You know, when I was growing up and he went into Publix places, they all played what we call elevator music. In fact, the term Muzak became synonymous with this type of music because Musak Holdings was actually a company, and it was the first, one of the first, to produce and distribute this kind of background music for commercial spaces starting way back in the early twentieth century.

You'd commonly hear it in the waiting room at a doctor's office, lobbies, shopping malls, other public spaces. Elevator music was meant to create a pleasant, unobtrusive atmosphere. It was meant to soothe, to mildly entertain, and to reduce the perceived wait time without being distracting.

Now traditionally, this elevator or or some would call it background music was was light instrumental versions of popular songs. A lot of times, it was instrumentals of soft rock hits or jazz or even classical music, but they were arranged in a very subdued, mellow manner.

In today's world, you don't really find that anymore. The once serene public spaces we used to enjoy have transformed into an explosion of sound and activity where silence is increasingly rare. Even going into a department store, you hear raucous music sometimes. This causes sensory overload to the human brain.

Now with the advent of technology and the constant connectivity of our devices, every moment is bringing us sound From the beeps of notifications to the music we hear anytime we're in a restaurant or a store, the world has become a place where silence really is the exception rather than the norm.

This new reality of our auditory environment takes us into sensory overload where the brain is constantly processing incoming sounds, whether we're consciously aware of it or not. Now some people are more sensitive to noise than others.

For some, the world is so noisy that it's a source of irritation. It contributes to stress and creates a longing for quiet spaces. But for other people, they like the noise, the familiar backdrop to their daily lives.

Cardinal Saar in his book wrote, sounds and emotions detach us from ourselves, whereas silence always forces man to reflect on his own life. Now sounds, whether they're music or media or conversations, loud motorcycles going by, they they can be distractions. They engage our emotional responses.

They pull us into experiences outside of ourselves. And if we're constantly in this state, then there's gonna be a disconnect from our inner thoughts and our self awareness because we're constantly reacting to external stimuli.

Music, for instance, has a unique capability to evoke strong emotions, which can sometimes serve as an escape or a way to process feelings without necessarily confronting the self directly. This emotional resonance can lead to a temporary detachment from one's own introspection, providing comfort or distraction from personal issues.

Silence, by contrast, lacks the external cues that sounds provide. In the absence of sound, we're left with our thoughts and our emotions, our internal dialogue. This can be unsettling for some as it compels us to confront what we might otherwise ignore or even suppress.

Silence forces personal reflection because there's nowhere else to turn but inward. And the great thing about this is this can lead to self discovery, personal growth, epiphanies. In silence, you might contemplate the big questions of life, assess your emotions, reflect on your decisions, and the trajectory of your life.

It's in these quiet moments that we often find clarity, peace, and sometimes confrontational truths about ourselves. I wanna turn our attention now and focus on one of the greatest saints in church history, Saint Joseph.

Now Saint Joseph has many titles, patron of the universal church, guardian of the holy family, guardian of the redeemer. And we venerate Saint Joseph for his wonderful virtues. He was a just man, prudent, strong, obedient, faithful, but he's also silent.

Scripture records no words from Saint Joseph. Isn't that interesting? Why wouldn't we get to hear what he said to Mary moments after Jesus was born? God has chosen to let the actions of Saint Joseph be our example and leave him in silence.

Perhaps this is a good reminder for us that our actions speak volumes. Our actions speak louder than our words. Cardinal Sarris says our world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking at a devastating speed and volume in order to say nothing.

The world is always talking, and it tells many falsehoods. It tells us that freedom exists so we may indulge our desires. But true freedom, when we think of how classical education formed youth centuries ago, true freedom is centered around living a good and virtuous life. The freedom to do the right thing.

True freedom in Christ is to be free from our desires ruling us because we're grounded in the virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance. Cardinal Sara in the book says silence is man's greatest freedom. But the world doesn't want us to be silent.

As Christians, we know that we're we're gonna always be at odds with the world. More appropriately, the world is is at odds with us. Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote in his spiritual exercises, the more the soul is in solitude and seclusion, the more fit it renders itself to approach and be united with its creator and lord.

Without noise, modern man is feverish. Noise gives the modern person security, like a drug on which he's become dependent. Noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself. It serves as a tranquilizer, a sedative, cardinal Sara's words, but it is a deceptive medicine.

Using noise as medicine is a diabolical lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior emptiness and says the awakening will be necessarily brutal when it comes. We're going to have to face ourselves eventually.

Modern existence as we experience the world today is fragile. It's it's artificial in so many ways. We have a life propped up by an unrelenting cacophony of noise, superficiality, and a total rejection of the divine.

This rejection of the sacred is not merely a passive absence of faith, but our culture has had an active turning away from the transcendent, leaving humanity to seek meaning in the material. Silence has become elusive, almost impossible, a rare and fleeting phenomenon, drowned out by our own clamor of ambition and distraction.

What's so interesting is the attitude of our society, in terms of how they view themselves, how we view ourselves. There's a lot of pride that we live in a transparent world, an open world with our commitment to constant communication, surveillance, the relentless flow of information.

But our world has a implacable hatred of silence. They view it not as a source of reflection or renewal, as it is, but as a contemptible backward defeat, an affront to being productive, connected, and always moving forward.

In the world's eyes, silence is like surrendering to stagnation, to refusal to participate in the constant twenty four seven march for progress. So it's eradicated.

Our society's rejection of silence actually reveals a lot about it, that we have a discomfort with introspection, vulnerability, and the existential questions that silence is going to bring to the forefront. The rejection of god and silence alike has left us tethered to a very superficial existence, where we are pursuing external validation and material gain rather than being silent and seeking solitude and searching for that inner peace, the transcendent truth that only god can provide.

So when we look back to that list of destructive ideologies that we started with, secularism, modernism, Marxism, Freemasonry, radical feminism and relativism, consumerism, the sexual revolution, new age spirituality, and the culture of death. These are very destructive ideologies, and we add noise to them.

But the church will prevail above all. These forces are not invincible. These forces are not invincible. Jesus is already conquered.

Through prayer and trust in God's grace, we resist error, and we will bear witness to the truth. Just be sure to carve out a little time for silent meditation each and every day.

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