Up until March, I’d spent most of my life running from school to sports to this event to that event. Prayer became my source of peace amidst the chaos—a respite from the rush of everyday life. It was the quiet time I craved after being with people all day.

COVID-19 really flipped that upside down. After spending eight monotonous months at home, where the beginning and ending of my days begin to blur, I’m kind of sick of the quiet. Often, the last thing I want to do is extend seemingly endless silence even further with time alone in prayer.

But St. John of the Cross teaches us to lean into this silence. He spent nine long months himself in an isolation much more severe than ours—he was locked in a stone room so small he barely fit. His only view of the outside world was through a tiny window high up on the wall of his cell. Yet it was in that utter loneliness that he found God’s light.

God isn’t just there to be a respite of the chaos. He wants to be a part of every moment in our day. St. John of the Cross tells us just that: “However softly we speak, God is so close to us that he can hear us; nor do we need wings to go in search of him, but merely to seek solitude and contemplate him within ourselves, without being surprised to find a good Guest there.” I don’t know how much longer this will all last, but for now, I’m just trying to remember that it is in these moments of silence that God hears us best. That it is in these moments of silence that he invites us in. We are in Advent, a season of preparation for the birth of Jesus. What better time to embrace the present, the uncertainty, the quiet? What better time to embrace the wait for the birth of Jesus just as we anticipate the return to “normal”?