On Complaining: Today's Most Common Cancer
The following is an excerpt from my new book Surviving Catholic Ministry, pgs. 64–65.
Though they are to be places of prayer, parishes are noisy things. There is a lot of chatter. It’s easy to participate in it and for this noise to sweep us away. The world is noisy enough as it is. The computers we carry in our pockets are constant reminders of that. There’s no need for the parish to contribute to the cacophony.
Often, parish staff members add to the din. I suppose it’s because we’re frustrated or dissatisfied. We grumble. This is decently hard work, after all. But that discontent breeds noise. “From the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45). We are prone to grumble. In his Rule, a rather short book, St. Benedict discourages grumbling eight times! Constant whining is destructive in the life of a community. It’s cancerous. Commenting on St. Benedict’s disdain for grumbling, Benedictine monk J. Augustine Wetta explains that “if you think about it, an outright fight is easier on a community than that ceaseless, cowardly, whining gossip that comes from a grumbler who ‘spreads strife’ and ‘separates close friends’ (Prov 16:28) . . . Grumbling makes everyone restless and angry—including the grumbler himself.”1
The discontent that fills the heart does need an outlet, so to speak. That first outlet needs to be prayer, which also includes listening. Blaise Pascal basically said the same thing once: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”2 Parishes need agents of silence. Those who, at the core, quiet themselves (internally and externally) and in humble silence seek the God who is silent. Parish staffs need members who embrace silence and so become prophets of silence.
Silence leads to the discovery of God who, though Other, dwells within. Robert Cardinal Sarah comments on this: “At the heart of man there is an innate silence, for God abides in the innermost part of every person. God is silence, and this divine silence dwells in man.”3 Parishes need people, staff people, who are capable of silence and who discover God in it—then show that way of silence and presence to others.
Wetta, Humility Rules, 68–69.
Pascal, Pensées, 37.
Sarah, The Power of Silence, 22.