A while ago I started a blog that I use to post bible study notes, Sunday homilies, and occasionally when I have the time, things I muse about. It was started about the same time we started the parish Facebook page and Twitter streams as a way to broaden the manner and means by which the parish communicates to parishioners and any interested person. To date I have posted 570 entries, there are 337 followers, and the blog has been viewed – and I find this amazing – 31,188 times.

My favorite blogs are the ones in which I muse. There is no guiding gospel passage, no life of a saint, and nothing to constrain or focus what I write. I just muse about whatever had captured my thought at the moment. One of my favorite posts begins this way: “Did you know that on January 10, 1992 – a cargo ship lost overboard 28,800 “rubber duckies?” I mean, seriously, you have to be curious about what happens to 28,800 rubber duckies adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

Rubber duckies aside, today, I am especially attentive to sounds and that has set me to musing about the sounds in our life. It is most evident that the Parish Plaza Project began today. Bright and early the construction crew was on site. The normally quiet, serene morning when the daily pilgrim enters the church accompanied by the sounds of Benedictine monks chanting, has been replaced by jack hammers, concrete saws, bobcats, and all manner of busy. It is the sound of change this way comes.

Lest you think mornings in the friary are solemn with the hushed movement of somber and earnest men preparing for a day of ministry, mornings have a familiar and unique hum: a coffee pot percolates, a blender whirrs, and a soliloquy on the merits of steel-cut oats for breakfast. This morning past was noticeably quiet. Today it is just Br. John and me. Fr. Sean, left at 0-dark-thirty this morning, driving off into the still dark morning heading east and north. Morning prayer and breakfast was just a little bit less animated. There was no weather report from the morning run on Bayshore. No soliloquy on oatmeal.

It was quiet. The quiet that makes you take notice. It is the sound of change this way comes. It is in its own way a call to look within. To turn off the sounds of the iPods, TVs, cell phones, to pause, and to consider that we are already living in a place filled with “pearls of great price.” (Matthew 13:46) In the gospel story the merchant has prepared his whole life to recognize the shape, color, luster, and iridescence of pearls. I suspect we too are prepared, but are perhaps waiting to discover the buried treasure (Mt 13:44) when we stumble upon it amidst the noise, hustle and bustle of our lives. So, I muse about being truly surrounded by pearls; already knowing the shape, color, luster, and iridescence of them; and only needing a moment of quiet or a space in time to take notice.

We are a gospel people called to name the pearls in our lives and called to give thanks to God. We will give thanks when we stumble upon the treasure, but we are called to the quiet to take time to notice what God has placed before us in plain sight.