I am interested in the fullest meaning of being silent. Not so much doing silence, but risking being undone by it. Sitting still in it, yes of course,. But if I’m honest also braving silence or wrestling with it until sweaty and exhausted I collapse under its body and gasp “I give.” I am not interested in silence theoretically or academically but intimately, personally, incarnationally. I am interested in silence not as an isolated entity from which we stand apart like objective observers but rather silence as a core human intention and deliberate way of engaging in life, the hushed and holy way of a listening heart.

And I think of this listening, to mix my metaphors, as a sort of dance by which the divine extends a hand and invites us into the silence. I want to dance that dance not because it is effortless or continually graceful but because my hunch is that everything that is alive, everything that is real and natural and noble, everything that hums from within or buzzes from without or moves with mystery and is what it is and yet more than it is comes from and is infused with this silence.

Fully understood and humanly speaking, there is no such thing as dead silence. Only persons who have forgotten, never learned, or are indifferent to listening. For those awake to it, silence is inseparable from listening and together they engender relationship and connection. When most fully realized we might call this inter-communion or holy communion. In this sense, listening loudly involves being alive to the aliveness of silence and all that silence makes space for. It is one of the deepest ways for humans to pray since, according to John of the Cross, God’s first language is silence. The paradox is that it is the same silence with which we prayerfully listen that communicates the ineffable messages our hearts are given to hear. This is an auditory image analogous to Meister Eckhart’s famous statement, “”The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love” (German Sermon, No. 12). The silence with which we listen is the same silence that speaks God and the things of God. Human listening, divine speaking—one silence.

REFLECTION:

• Do you spend a lot of time driving in your car? Do you listen to the radio?

• Do you spend a lot of time inside your home? Do you have a tendency to turn on the radio or TV to fill the space silence makes? Instead consider choosing silence for a day, or an evening, or a specific day of the week, or even a week — maybe on a silent retreat. Oh my!