Last Sunday, as we prepared to take a one-day trip to Birmingham for an ETWN interview on At Home with Jim & Joy (here’s the schedule), we found that our high-decibel life with a flock of excited kids on holiday was not conducive to careful packing. We both forgot important things.

You know how it goes. You’re trying to move through a travel checklist—toothbrush, phone charger—but then comes a trumpet blast from the next room. And a round of piano practice sends Christmas songs tumbling through the house, along with an argument between trumpeter and pianist, and perhaps an annoyed cat or two scrambling to get out of the fray. No doubt, your home has its own medley of noise as the Christmas anticipation builds.    

Later, in the relative quiet of the plane, we recalled a moving meditation that we read a few years ago. In a Magnificat meditation, we read how St. John of the Cross “used the imagery of a house grown still and silent” to describe a soul centered on God. In his Songs of the Soul, St. John of the Cross writes about the Lord dwelling “in secret and in silence…in intimate union” in the “depth and center of my soul.” “My house, at last, grown still,” (estando ya mi casa sosegada) he sings. 

At first glance, this type of quiet seems impossible for us. And yet, as his words sank in, we glimpsed what the Lord is offering each of us, especially in these Advent days. St. John was a monk who lived an austere way of life in a barren cell. We are parents, called to raise children and to delight in loud, bustling homes. But the same Lord invites each of us—every one of us, no matter our vocation—to strip down the inner room of our heart, to create an inner sanctum that has “grown still.”  
 
Our household economy—the 3rd level of a Trinity House and our focus the third week of each month—is now at its frenzied heights. But that frenzy is all the more reason to cultivate that still, spare room. In this silent room, we focus only on God. We remove everything from the walls of this cell.
 
And as we leave the cell to enter into the joyful activities of our home, we carry this stillness of heart with us. We carry this peace into the other (understandably and even rightly) noisy and chaotic rooms of our home. We imbue the Advent busyness with our peaceful heart, focused deep within, on Christ who is present. To paraphrase St. Mother Teresa, we are “contemplatives in the heart of the home.”   
 
Without this inner room grown still, we know exactly how the secular Christmas story goes: cacophony, chaos, exhaustion and anxiety. With this inner room, we live a different story as we anticipate the birth of our Savior: order, peace, and a rich symphony of family life.

In the Advent days remaining to us, may our Trinity Houses bustle and be filled with songs and sounds and smells—all anchored, deep within, by the bare and still silence of our inner room where we await the coming of the Prince of Peace!

“For you alone, my soul in stillness waits, truly my hope is in you.”

This post is adapted from a December 2020 post.