In his book “Jesus of Nazareth” Pope Benedict XVI writes the following when talking about a motif known as bread and circuses.
‘The idea is that after bread has been provided, a spectacle has to be offered, too. Since merely bodily satisfaction is obviously not enough for man, so this interpretation goes, those who refuse to let God have anything to do with the world and with man are forced to provide the titillation of exciting stimuli, the thrill of which replaces religious awe and drives it away”
And then on the following page, the Pope writes this:
“The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him. For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we can experimentally test and grasp.”
Near the beginning of his wonderful book, the Pope presents two powerful reflections. The first deals with the fact that most people have lost the sense of God in the world, a sense of religious awe, and instead replace this with “the titillation of exciting stimuli”. And in the second reflection, Pope Benedict throws out the idea that people have largely given up the practice of interior listening.
These two ideas are closely related. All people are searching, searching for ultimate meaning, searching for God. And yes, God is found in nature and in others, no doubt about it. But, in a special way, God is also found in silence, in interior listening. In interior listening, and in the love of God and others that is the fruit of interior listening, people find God and find true happiness. And yet, interior listening isn’t practiced much these days. And the result is that people have a big void, a hunger for God and the things of God which is no longer getting quenched.
And so what do all people try to do? To quench that thirst for God of course. They do so normally by creating and or searching for the “titillation of exciting stimuli”. This titillation scratches the surface of our hunger for God, but that is it. Some of us discover it more quickly than others, but the void is always there. The deep hunger can only be replaced and filled up by God and the things of God.
I’ve got the deep Hunger for God and you’ve got the deep Hunger for God. If you are like me and like many, then there is some way in which you are seeking the titillation of exciting stimuli to fill up your hunger; and you are doing this instead of seeking God in the silence of interior listening.
So right now, answer this question, in what ways are you trying to fill up your hunger for God with exciting stimuli?
Now that you’ve come up with at least one way that you do that, now what can you do this week, to stop relying on that excitement and at the same time, what can you do this week to bathe in silence, to do some majore interior listening.
