There is a story about a young man who wanted to find peace in his life. He went from town to town looking for the answer, but the answers he received were of no use. One day he arrived at a town and asked if anyone could answer his question: “How can I find peace in my life?”
He was told to go to the clockmaker’s shop, for there lived a wise clockmaker who might be able to answer his question. When the young man entered the workshop, he was astonished: hundreds of clocks hanging on the walls—clocks of every kind, large and small, pendulum and battery-operated. They were all working, all telling the time, producing a chaotic tick-tock that filled the place in a rather deafening way.
The elderly clockmaker, seated at his workbench with his eyes closed, opened them serenely when he heard the young man enter. “Hello,” the young man said. “Hi!” replied the old man, but the young man could not hear him. The old man asked him a couple of times if he needed a clock, but the young man could not hear him over the noise of the clocks. The old man led him into the next room, which was isolated from the noise of the clocks, so that he could hear him, and repeated the question: “Are you looking for a clock?” “No,” said the young man, “I am looking for something more important—I am seeking inner peace, and I was told that you could help me.”
“Your problem is the same as the one you had when you entered the clockmaker’s shop,” he told him. “How so?” asked the young man. “I don’t understand.” The clockmaker said: “When you came into the workshop, I heard you and I heard your greeting, but you could not hear me, even though you are young and your ears work better than mine. Do you know why?” “No,” replied the young man. “Because you let yourself be deafened by the noise of the clocks, and that noise drowned out my voice. The same thing happens with peace: while your mind is a shouting match of worries, anxieties, and selfish interests, deafening as they are, you will never hear God, who whispers in your heart. To find peace, you must listen to that whisper of God, and to hear it, you must not let the noises of the world deafen you as the clocks deafened you.”
The teaching of this parable is very simple: to find inner peace, we need to practice inner silence. To attain inner silence, we must silence our own judgments, disordered passions, and our desires that are contrary to the Will of God.
It is important to understand that this silence cannot be attained without a true ascetic effort of concrete and constant mortifications. We may quiet a disordered affection for a day or two, but that is not enough to silence it; it is quieted for a time, but then it returns to making noise because we have not mortified it enough. Therefore, the real work requires perseverance in that effort until we truly silence that inner movement that produces noise and prevents us from hearing God—and only in God do we find true peace, because only the love of God can bring inner order, and inner order produces peace.
Silence and peace have the same heartbeat; they go hand in hand. Silence calms the inner noises so that we may put them in order according to the love of God. If we allow the noises of our judgments, passions, and desires to disorder our interior, we will only achieve chaos. This is not only because we all have different loves that strive to prevail over the others, but also because those loves, when they are not ordered toward the love of God, only produce a worldly agitation that does not let the soul rest.
