“Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”

— St. Francis of Assisi

How often have you thought, ” Speak up!  Your actions are so loud that I can’t hear a word you are saying.”  We all like to talk the talk; but if we want to be heard, the best amplifier is walking the walk.

When I read these words of St. Francis, I pictured a whole monastery full of monks, silently walking through their day, only using their eyes to greet one another.  I always thought this was a contemplative sort of practice — one designed to take one’s thoughts inward and focus them on the spiritual plane rather than the physical one.  Today I thought of it differently.  In the midst of that silence, each monk still went about doing his work — work that contributed to the well-being and expanding of the community.  They cooked in silence.  They swept in silence.  They tended the gardens in silence.  How loud that silence must have been!

Have you ever played charades?  What was it like to have people rely only on your actions in order to understand what you were trying to tell them?  I, for one, find that it is far easier to use words to convey my message than to act it out and hope to be understood.  Suppose that today we all lived as though we were separated from the rest of the world by a sound-proof barrier.  Suppose that the only way to communicate our Truth was through our actions.  How would we live differently today?

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if the first thing people saw when we arrived was our Truth, marching far ahead of our words, and acted out in every movement we made?  Let’s give it a try.  Let’s preach our Truth, our Love, our Light — and if necessary, use words.