One of the fathers said, “Just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled water, so also the soul, unless it is clear of alien thoughts, is not able to pray to God in contemplation.”

Today’s instruction is all about noise. Noise, the holy one teaches, is what separates us from ourselves. But if the people of third-century Egypt had a problem, what can possibly be said of our own generation? We even have a problem because the culture of birdsong, the culture of rural quiet, has become the culture of cacophony. Twenty-four hours a day our world crackles with Rock and Rap and Country and Beat and idle talk and senseless complaint. It’s these words that do our thinking for us. Twenty-four hours a day this kind of noise substitutes for what might have become our own insights. Their meaningless presence everywhere—in stores, and offices, on street corners and in cars—distorts our search for the contemplative awareness of God in life. In between, of course, we pray the prayers of our youth, words of comfort and tradition. But, immersed in the recitation of routine, even religious routine, there is little time for listening to what the Word of the universe might be trying to say to us.

The image the teacher uses is a simple one. Sometimes we can lower our heads over quiet waters and see into our own eyes. But when the waters roil, we find the image splintered and distorted. Nothing we see can be trusted to be real. But more than that, when our souls are filled with noise, contemplation itself suffers. The noise of nothingness, the rattle and clamor of useless agendas, entombs us in ourselves. Then, contemplation itself is endangered. Distraction and ambition, anger and jealousy, pride and pain, fatigue and overload—all these distort the sense of the presence of God for us.

As surely as this saying was important to the shift of cultures from the third to the sixth centuries, even more so is it necessary to us. We are a people in transition from the local and the national to the global and the secular. No single institution is big enough to save either our individualism or the spiritual lives we must fashion within us, if, in fact, we are to know God at all.

For that, only the silence of our own souls will do—the personal connection between God and me.

—excerpted from In God’s Holy Light: Wisdom from the Desert Monastics by Joan Chittister (Franciscan Media)