Happy In Quietude

I am enjoying my life as an unlonely loner, quite the opposite of my younger years when I was a lonely and depressed loner.  Living alone has its challenges, but it is also very free, doing what I please, when I please.  Tonight is especially a peaceful night with my mind largely at rest.  I am able to enjoy this state of being probably because I had attended a Saturday evening vigil Mass in the late afternoon and left the church with a temporary souvenir: the peace of God.

While I am totally at peace at the moment, a fragment of it went missing a little earlier when I was updating a previous post entered two days ago with a news report on two low ranking politicians, Laurent Fabius, France's foreign minister, and Bernard Cazeneuve, France's interior minister, who jointly offered asylum to the dispossessed and displaced Iraqi Christians. [1]  The thought that I cannot do anything to bring comfort to the lives of the persecuted when secular and religious leaders seem only to care about their own little worlds was upsetting.  I confess that I had thought of them (including a former president) as serpents that Satan sleeps with until they are no longer useful at which time they are tossed out like the filth, and might I confessedly add, forever festering in venom in the snake pit of Hell. [2]

Here I am reaching out with futility to the persecuted Iraqi Christians and non-Christians alike from the comfort of my room with earbuds delivering Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture [3], the Pilgrim's Chorus [4] and the Grand March [5] into my head does not paint a picture of usefulness, let alone care.  Perhaps my hypocrisy equals, if not exceeds that of those I had so bitterly criticized in the paragraph above.  Perhaps I ought to be content in my solitude and retreat into my make-belief hermitage divorced from the noises of this world.  I am happy to exist alone in quietude, in prayer, in peace [6] and in love.  For however long I have been granted the grace to live as such, I am grateful.



[1] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/07/france-offers-asylum-iraqi-christians-2014728125854650414.html
[2] Oh, am I bitter still!
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTM7E4-DN0o
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBqwAGj5fDA (professional German version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDdb65l-49E (amateur Chinese-German version)
[6] Like Tannhäuser whose addiction to the profane had kept the sacred out of his reach, my inability to gain complete detachment from the world around me will keep the permanence of Christ's Peace out of mine.  Only at death can detachment from the profanities of the world occur and only then can the repentance of sins be final and salvation be possible.