Besides being a unique, life-giving “habitat,” silence is a “habit of the heart”, a conscious choice, an intentional practice, a deliberate and daily orientation to life capable of nourishing us and teaching us how to grow into mature, caring human beings. In the life of prayer and in the prayer of life, silence is the secret language of God. Mystics from all the world religions seem to know this and, as with all languages, immersion is the best way to learn the language of God.

Silence is the womb of wakefulness, the place of encounter, an occasion for revelation, the dark cell where convictions come to light and are forged, the font of many deaths and many rebirths, the parlance of praise. Silence is the field that holds a hidden treasure or the mollusk in which a dense concretion becomes a pearl of great price. Pray-ers that dare to relinquish their reliance on words are plunged into the kind of poverty that exposes us both to our own duplicity and to our own belovedness. Both sobering and affirming, silence keeps us honest and elicits humility and gratefulness.♦

pax

Source: Daniel J. Miller, [a work in progress], © 2009.
PRACTICE:

Do lectio divina with this paragraph.