For centuries, spiritual teachers have emphasized that words and actions that are truly powerful and life-giving come from silence. That is, they come from the hearts of people who have taken in thoughts, ideas, and experiences from the world around them, and have digested them. They've reflected on them. They've take the time to get quiet, and connect to the voice and leading of the Holy Spirit within. The need to do this is critically important today.

 

Unless we find ways of doing this, our actions and words will be incongruous, and our teaching will be anemic at best, and damaging at worst. 

 

I'm reading a fascinating book by Robert Sarah, a Roman Catholic Cardinal from South Africa. It's called "The Power of Silence." The irony is not lost on me that this book goes on for 244 pages talking about silence! Sometimes he waxes more philosophical and poetic than I'm in the mood for, but there are many helpful and important insights here. 

 

Please note, when we talk about "silence" what we're referring to is more of an "inner silence" than anything else. You don't have to go up on a mountain to get this. "Silence" is about a lifestyle that includes time for reflection. It's a lifestyle where you're not constantly on the go, and you don't constantly have the TV or radio on. Instead, you create space for thinking, meditating, and praying. You let your mind settle, so you can think and pray through things. It's when you give yourself time for your inner hard drive to defragment.

 

I'm going to share some extended quotes for you from the book. You'll note that the book makes no effort at gender inclusive language, with all its talk about "man" and "he" and so on. Trying not to change the quotes up too much, I'm just leaving them as is:

 

 

 

 

 

God achieves everything, acts in all circumstances, and brings about all our interior transformations. But he does it when we wait for him in recollection and silence. In silence, not in the turmoil and noise, God enters into the innermost depths of our being. ... This divine law surprises us. It goes so much against our experience of the natural laws of the world. Here below, any profound transformation, any great external change produces a certain agitation and noise. ... [But] if we observe the great works, the most powerful acts, the most extraordinary and striking interior transformations that God carries out in man, we are forced to admit that he works in silence.

...
The silence of everyday life is an indispensable condition for living with others. Without the capacity for silence, man is incapable of hearing, loving, and understanding the people around him. Charity is born of silence. It proceeds from a silent heart that is able to hear, to listen, and to welcome. Silence is a condition for otherness and a necessity if one is to understand himself. Without silence, there is neither rest nor serenity nor interior life...

In the noise of everyday life there is always a certain agitation that is stirred up in man. Noise is never serene, and it is not conducive to understanding another person. How right Pascal was when he wrote: 'All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.'

...

Father Marie-Eugene wrote: 'Whatever changes time may bring, God remains the same, and it is always in silence that He utters His Word and that the soul must receive it. The law of silence is imposed on us. The high-strung excitability of the modern temperament makes it more urgently important, and exacts of us a most resolute effort to respect and to submit to it.

 

'God speaks in silence, and silence alone seems able to express Him. For the spiritual person who has known the touch of God, silence and God seem to be identified. And so, to find God again, where would he go, if not to the most silent depths of his soul, into those regions that are so hidden that nothing can any longer disturb them? When he has reached there, he preserves with jealous care the silence that gives him God. He defends it against any agitation, even that of his own powers.'

...
Mankind must join a sort of resistance movement. What will become of our world if it does not look for intervals of silence? Interior rest and harmony can flow only from silence. Without it, life does not exist.

 

 

 

The more we are clothed in glory and honors, the more we are raised in dignity, the more we are invested with public responsibilities, prestige, and temporal offices, whether as laymen, priests, or bishops, the more we need to advance in humility and to cultivate carefully the sacred dimension of our interior life by constantly seeking to see the face of God in prayer, meditation, contemplation, and asceticism. It can happen that a good, pious priest, once he is raised [to a more prestigious position], quickly falls into mediocrity and a concern for worldly success.

 

Overwhelmed by the weight of the duties that are incumbent on him, worried about his power, his authority, and the material needs of his office, he gradually runs out of steam. He manifests in his being and in his works a desire for promotion, a longing for prestige, and a spiritual degradation. He is harmful to himself and to the flock over which the Holy Spirit set him as guardian to feed the church of God, which God acquired for himself by the blood of his own Son. We all run the danger of being preoccupied with worldly business and concerns if we neglect the interior life, prayer, the daily face-to-face encounter with God, the ascetical practices necessary for every contemplative and every person who wants to see the Eternal One and to live with him.

 

Recall what Saint Gregory the Great wrote in a letter to a friend. Faced with a tension between his monastic life and his office as pope, with all the social and political responsibilities that the latter involved, he bitterly spelled out in these terms his difficulties in harmonizing contemplation and action: 'I have lost the profound joys of my peace and quiet, and I seem to have risen externally, while falling internally. Wherefore, I deplore my expulsion far from the face of my Creator. ... Indeed there are many who know how to control external successes in such a way that they in no way collapse internally because of them. [But I struggle to do so.]"