Fr Matthew Reese

For God alone my soul in silence waits; * 
from him comes my salvation.
God has spoken once, twice have I heard it, * 
that power belongs to God.
Psalm 62:1,13

Dear Friends in Christ,

When I was in New York for a conference recently, I did a rare thing… I watched network television in real time. Until a few months ago, Emma and I didn’t own a television. The last time I had a TV was the one in the basement of my childhood home—a small, outrageously boxy thing that we had to get a converter for when the antennas would no longer function.

Of course, this isn’t to say that I didn’t watch television. But like many people of my generation, I would catch up with the previous night’s news or a favorite show the next morning on a streaming app on my laptop.

That is a much more curated, much less frantic experience than CNBC on a hotel television.

Advertisements! Good heavens, so many ads! And then when the scheduled programming returned, three-quarters of the screen was covered in stock tickers, and breaking news. A migraine-inducing barrage of numbers and updates and advice and potential investments and expensive pharmaceuticals for diseases you didn’t even know existed!

Television, social media apps, smartphone notifications. All these things are designed, of course, to distract and enthrall us. To get us to buy. To make us feel somehow inadequate or “sub-optimized,” or under-utilized, or whatever turn-of-phrase proved most efficacious in the focus groups… Our unrealized potential just one purchase away. 

I turned it off. 

One of the gifts of Lent is an opportunity to shed those worries and accretions to our lives which distract us from God.  

We are invited to slow down, to simplify things, to strip things back, to wait in the silence of uneasy expectation until, finally, we can actually hear God’s call.

As we will read in Morning Prayer today, “For God alone my soul in silence waits; * from him comes my salvation.”

What can we do to carve out that time? To sit in silence and contemplation? To turn away from our devices, and the tickers, and the unending updates and notifications?

Surely in that silence, we will draw a little closer. God might speak—that we might hear him twice.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew