God speaks life– Rom 6:19-23

Thursday of OT Week 29, St. Antony Claret; Holy Cross Parish.

I think sometimes we crave a little more peace and quiet in our lives.  Certainly, living with undergraduates last year, I often did, and then I’d spare a prayer for parents of young children!  But, there’s a limit to how much quiet we’re able to handle.  The quietest room on earth is Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis.  It’s called an anechoic chamber: double walls and insulated steel, foot-thick concrete and fiberglass wedges make it 99.99% sound absorbent.  The human ear can detect nothing inside it.  The longest any human has managed to stay inside is 45 minutes, and that was a NASA astronaut used to spending time in space.  That amount of pure silence becomes so unnerving, that people start to hallucinate.  It’s so engrained in your brain that it’s going to receive stimulation that if it doesn’t receive any, it starts to make it up.

We listen.  That’s what we humans do.  The Latin for listening (audire) is the root of the English word obedience.  We are all obedient.  Paul’s question, in today’s first reading, is: what are we obedient to?  Do we tune our listening ears to sin, or to righteousness?  Sin can be very loud sometimes.  It can be enticing, like a pied-piper, because sin is a very rewarding master.  Sin pays its slaves wages, very reliable ways.  Sin pays out death for those who obey it.

But, sin isn’t all there is to listen to.  Listen deeper.  Let a new master’s voice capture your ear.  Realer than sin there’s a still small voice, often a whisper, sometimes shouting from the rooftops.  God speaks.  We can listen.  It’s the most beautiful sound of the world.  God speaks life.  To listen to God, really listen, to obey, is to receive a gift.  Unlike sin, there are no wages from listening to God, but there is a precious gift that we could never merit.  To listen to God is to be given eternal life with Christ Jesus.

St. Antony Claret listened to God.  He listened for God in prayer and scripture, hearing the call to found a community, the Claretians.  He listened to God through his religious superiors, leaving his fledgling Spanish community to serve as Archbishop of Cuba.  He listened to God through the cries of the poor, spending time with the slaves in Cuba and then acting to press for abolition, spending time with prisoners, and then acting to save a man who had tried to assassinate him from the gallows.  He listened to the grace of God working through the repentant hearts of loved sinners who came to him for confession.  And he was convinced: sin will not be their master; obey righteousness.  But we don’t celebrate him because of his success.  We celebrate him because of what he was given: he was given eternal life.  Through his prayers, may we incline our ear to closer and closer attend to our True Master’s voice, the Master who triumphed over death, casts aside sin’s wages and has only gifts to give.  St. Antony Claret, pray for us.