We’ve all heard the adage “silence is golden,” but in and of itself silence is morally neutral. It is what we make of it or what it makes of us that determines whether it is helpful or anemic, healthy or harmful, enlivening or lethal. When prayer is what we do with it or what it does to us, silence is “a helping presence.” Some silence is nothing more than cowardice, the swallowed tongue of the guilty bystander. When pointed at others out of resentment, cruelty, or revenge, it is a weapon — the silent treatment — aimed to punish or wound. When played out in behavior identified as antisocial, it is frequently the sign of a timid or tormented soul. In the face of injustice, when joined with the silence of others, it causes severe damage by becoming a quiet conspiracy of fear or indifference leading to exploitation and oppression.

I am concerned not simply with quietness or the elimination of noise or with mere muteness but rather with what Merton describes as the “true silence which is alive and which carries a loving presence.” I am talking about a creative, fecund silence. Silence as the sacred situation where absolutely nothing appears to happen and yet where absolutely everything essential and bountiful begins and takes place including the likes of wonder, awe, gratefulness, friendship, all expressions of love, humor, celebration, dreaming, as well as unlearning, disintegration, self-knowledge, remorse, grief, sympathy, all forms of prayer, the works of justice and peace and mercy.

What I want us to consider is the conscious, grace-filled effort to pay attention to silence, to listen to and from silence, to practice it, to put it on like a poncho or a prayer shawl or to crawl into it like a quilted lair. I want us to take it in like a venerable guest or if you prefer to be taken into it as into a grandmother’s wide bosom or a grandfather’s ready lap. What I want for you and for me is to be moved by the spirit of its soundless rhythm, to follow its lead like a trail of bread crumbs back home to God or to concern for others or to our truest self or to “the incomprehensible surprise of being.” What I want is for us to sit with it as with a spouse or an old friend with whom love is no longer measured in words, to receive its profound wisdom as if by osmosis. And then, when it is time, I want us to carry it, in whatever measure, amid the noise and haste, as a gift to each other and to the world.

REFLECTION:

What is your relationship to silence?
Friends? Strangers? Intimate companions? Uncomfortable with? Other:
Exercise your imagination: what is your image for silence?