What do you think of this?

Interesting, eh?

There’s something good about it — bold, audacious. Yes there’s something there to think about.

Not everybody could get away with this as well as BF, EJ, AM etc.

But hardly deep enough to support you in keeping the faith in a world as hostile to God as the one we inhabit today.

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More traditional and musically in a different and higher class is this:

Still inspiring 268 years after being written’

Whenever this one is performed, everybody present feels it appropriate to stand up out of respect.

Yes, but it is very noisy, is it not?

Ideal, perhaps for public expressions of confident faith — but how useful in times when faith reaches breaking point through tragedy, despair and failure?

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This next one takes us a long way towards contemplating and experiencing something of the infinity of God.

Yes, this one, more ancient, is more “supernatural” in its feel.

Some would say that it can take one as far towards experiencing God’s presence as we are willing to go. Do you agree?

Any faults? Perhaps the very beauty of this composition is, itself, a distraction.

Hard not to think of the genius who wrote it and the brilliance of the vocals required to sing it — which could take one’s mind off God himself.

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This next is different again. Simpler.

Those who give their life fully to God, day in day out, by joining special communities — like entering a monastery — use the simplest, most ancient, of all musical forms — plainchant.

No distraction. Nothing to think about except God himself.

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God does not call everybody to enter religious life as in leaving the outside world altogether.

Yet for everybody, the most important aid to meeting with God is available.

Yes to everybody.

That greatest of all aids to contemplation is SILENCE.

Blessed Mary MacKillop, like all saints, loved to spend time in silence with God — silently contemplating him.

Yes, she was a woman of action, but she believed such activity was a “less agreeable duty” which must not interfere with her primary interest, the contemplation of God.

In the early days, her younger sisters (Lexie and Annie) would mock Mary for the long times she spent in prayer and contemplation. Yet later, both became, themselves, women of prayer.

When Mother Mary was too preoccupied to stop her worldly duties, she tried to make all her life, even her busiest times, a prayer.

She wrote to Father Woods, “God’s presence seems to follow me everywhere and make everything I do or wish to do a prayer . . . . I love at night to sleep where I can see the lamp burning and the Tabernacle behind it.”

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The silence that matters is inner silence.

Even if the world refuses to be quiet around you, you can still quieten the frettings about the future and the broodings about the past, which are the real enemies of spiritual silence.

Once they are put aside, even a busy life can be an on-going act of contemplation of the Lord.