In today’s world, silence may be a phenomenon startling to most of us; shocking as immersion into an ice cold lake. We may have a sense of being both startled and gasping for the comfort of noise. We do not quite know what to make of silence. It is perhaps quite rare to find the opportunity to immerse one’s self into…s i l e n c e.  It creates palpable pauses, sips of serenity, uncoiling the spring of our hectic lives.

We slip into an empty church and, for a moment, inhabit a world of silence. In the early church, the hermits and monks sought the ascetism of severe monastic silence and equated it with a complete withdrawal from the world. Stripping themselves of every worldly desire, including the need to communicate with words, they wandered away from the cities and into the deserts of Egypt to sit alone and hear only the wind across the barren terrain.

Silence can mean many things; it may be an incapacity for relationship or community; it can be punitive, passive, overlooking or disregarding another, or the muteness of the weak. Or it may be a profound form of communication. Noise, too, may mean many things; it may be intimate dialogue, sharing wisdom, beautiful music, profound conversation, attention or power.  Or it may be a vibrating cacophony of sound, bad news, and distraction.

We may be suffocating under the weight of our noise and busyness, until we, too, march only to a steady clamor. Bombarded relentlessly, cluttered up with words, we are crowded into cramped spaces in our lives. If we could wander into the desert for some silence into which God can speak to us, if we can hear His silence, it can drill down into the depths of our being. There God quietly pours His love into us.

Silence is a steely knife from which to carve the beauty of intimate communication and prayer. Consciously carved out of the noise, an ancient ascetical practice, a countercultural movement, the afterglow of such time with our Lord opens a reengagement in communication with our fellow man. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus withdrew from His ministry and the crowds into the solitude and muted stillness of prayer with the Father. It was here that the intimate breath of the Father was breathed back into our Lord. We cannot know the depth of such love that was spoken in these moments; we can only hear echoes of these whispers in our own silence.

Embracing the silence of our being before God is an essential component of worship. Patiently, slowly we are swallowed up by the reverberating echoes of quiet, as we still our hearts. In that vast interior we hear the mysterious and intimate whisperings of God. We may wonder at God’s silence.

Karl Rahner asked God, “Why are You so silent? …Isn’t Your silence a sure sign that You’re not listening? Or do You really listen quite attentively, do You perhaps listen my whole life long, until I have told you everything, until I have spoken out my entire self to You? Do You remain so silent precisely because You are waiting until I am really finished? So that You can then speak Your word to me, the word of Your eternity?”*

Carve out a space of sacred silence within your life; speak out yourself into that vast silence. When you have poured out your heart to the Father, emptied yourself out…listen, yield as He speaks the word of His eternal love without words.