“No way!” That’s what we said over breakfast yesterday when we realized that the same line in morning prayer had leapt off the page at us. But it’s actually not surprising when you consider our day-to-day reality…which probably looks and sounds a lot like yours.
 
From our son’s trumpet practice for an online music class to the sound of the kids stampeding during a “virtual break,” our home has never been so LOUD. Most days, seven of us are “doing life” in the same rather small house.

Who’s counting (?) but on any given weekday, our kids combined attend 20 classes, interface with 17 different teachers, and log 30 hours online. Add the Advent bustle—decorating, baking, wrapping, and a piano recital via Zoom—and there’s plenty of movement.   
 
Then came yesterday. On the feast of St. John of the Cross (and Soren’s birthday!), we read in the Magnificat devotional how he “used the imagery of a house grown still and silent” to describe a soul centered on God. 

We were struck by this and, turning to his works, found how in his Songs of the Soul, he wrote 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. Frankly, this seemed impossible to us.
 
And yet, as his words sunk 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 3^rd level of your 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 “contemplative 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.”