Homily for Friday of the 10th Week in Ordinary Time

In our Psalm response today, which comes from Psalm 27, we hear the prayer of one who earnestly searches for God. “I long to see your face, O LORD.”  

The quest of this Psalm is one that, perhaps, resonates with all of us because all of us, to varying degrees, are searchers. Our ultimate search is for God, the source of our very existence, and our ultimate destiny. St. Augustine echoes the longing of this prayer when he says, “You have made us for yourself, O LORD, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

It is the searcher in us that makes us travelers on a journey toward God. Elijah the prophet was that kind of searcher when embarked on his journey to the mountain of God, Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb, as it was also called. In a cave on that mountain, he encountered God in a quiet way; in a “sound of sheer silence.”

Silence is not easy to find by in our busy and, often, noisy lives. However, that is where the LORD is best heard. We often have to seek such silence in order to find it. To seek silence is, in a very real way, to seek the LORD, because it is where we become most aware of the LORD’S presence.+