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| Boulder at Moeraki, New Zealand |
Silence is a quality of the soul. It is acquired and deepened through physical silence, but ultimately the source of genuinely satisfying silence is grace, the gift for which we are best disposed to receive through a dedicated life of prayer, in the most complete sense of the word.
https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2021/11/what-is-silence.html
If silence is difficult to endure...if in order to pray we require music playing in the background or hanker for some kind of auditory stimulation, I seriously question whether we have ever developed the capacity to listen to God in silent prayer.
True, God speaks in many ways and through many channels, but he speaks in a special, inimitable way in the silent prayer that seeks our full attention.
There is a communication between the heart and God that is by its very nature silent, so that by this token, silent prayer is essential to the spiritual life.
When we speak of silent prayer, we are not excluding prayer that is concomitantly audible or vocal. Working together, the silent prayer of the heart and vocal prayer may indeed coincide.
https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-role-of-silence-in-spiritual-life.html
God speaks anywhere and anytime, but it’s usually easier to hear him in silent prayer. Also, a period of silent recollection disposes us better to hear him. Those who get impatient and frustrated at waiting for God to speak are possibly not accustomed to listening to God and so fail to recognize his voice even when he is communicating directly to them. The sad reality is that some are deaf to God’s words as a result of sinful habits. They are sometimes in grave spiritual danger.
Saint Joseph does not say a word in any of the gospels. He was not a mute, obviously, but if Joseph had suffered some sort of speech impairment, it would have been a detail significant enough for the evangelists to at least remark on it. They did not, which underscores his silence.
Silence in a just man is a sign of his hidden life of prayer, because in an especially efficacious manner silence cultivates prayer. In silence, our hearts speak to God and we hear God’s voice. As a rule, noise is inimical to this kind of deep, intimate prayer.
The gospels report that Joseph obeyed his dreams in four instances: when he was told that the child in Mary’s womb had been conceived by the Holy Spirit; when he was warned by an angel to leave Bethlehem and flee to Egypt because Herod sought to kill Jesus; when after Herod had passed away, an angel assured him that it was safe to return to Israel from Egypt; and when he was warned not to return to Judea where Archelaus was the ruler, so that Joseph settled the family at Nazareth.
Joseph is that rare example of unerring discernment. We propose that his gift naturally flowed from his outstanding life of obedience to God and his constancy in listening to the Lord in silent prayer.
No doubt Joseph was able to recognize God’s voice in his dreams because he had developed the habit of prayerfully listening to the Lord and had learned how to distinguish God’s voice from its counterfeits.
https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2020/07/placeholder-3-of-4.html
Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (August 15, 1917-March 24, 1980) was the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated for his outspokenness by agents of the political right wing of El Salvador. He spoke out against structural poverty, social injustice, assassinations, and torture. In 1993 the Truth Commission for El Salvador, created under the auspices of the United Nations, identified Roberto D’Aubuisson, a right-wing politician and death squad leader, as responsible for giving the order to kill Romero.
“If my person is repulsive to some, who would therefore silence my voice, let them not look at me, but at him who bids me tell them: Love one another! It is not me they hear, but the Lord, who is love and wants to make us his own by the sign of his love.”
“When the truth is spoken, it gives offense, and the voices that speak the truth are put to silence.”
—The Violence of Love: Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman, S.J., foreword by Henri Nouwen (New York: The Plough Publishing House, 2011)
https://oddsandendsgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-fifth-step-of-silence.html
PICO IYER ON SILENCE
ReplyDeleteEvery one of us knows the sensation of going up, on retreat, to a high place and feeling ourselves so lifted up that we can hardly imagine the circumstances of our usual lives, or all the things that make us fret. In such a place, in such a state, we start to recite the standard litany: that silence is sunshine, where company is clouds; that silence is rapture, where company is doubt; that silence is golden, where company is brass.
But silence is not so easily won. …
We have to earn silence…to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.
Or simply breathe. For silence is responsiveness, and in silence we can listen to something behind the clamor of the world. “A man who loves God, necessarily loves silence,” wrote Thomas Merton, who was, as a Trappist, a connoisseur, a caretaker of silences. It is no coincidence that places of worship are places of silence: if idleness is the devil’s playground, silence may be the angels’. It is no surprise that silence is an anagram of license. And it is only right that Quakers all but worship silence, for it is the place where everyone finds his God, however he may express it. Silence is an ecumenical state, beyond the doctrines and divisions created by the mind. If everyone has a spiritual story to tell of his life, everyone has a spiritual silence to preserve.
So it is that we might almost say silence is the tribute we pay to holiness; we slip off words when we enter a sacred space, just as we slip off shoes. A “moment of silence” is the highest honor we can pay someone; it is the point at which the mind stops and something else takes over (words run out when feelings rush in). A “vow of silence” is for holy men the highest devotional act. We hold our breath, we hold our words; we suspend our chattering selves and let ourselves “fall silent,” and fall into the highest place of all.
…There is, of course, a place for noise, as there is for daily lives. There is a place for roaring, for the shouting exultation of a baseball game, for hymns and spoken prayers, for orchestras and cries of pleasure. Silence, like all the best things, is best appreciated in its absence: if noise is the signature tune of the world, silence is the music of the other world, the closest thing we know to the harmony of the spheres. But the greatest charm of noise is when it ceases. In silence, suddenly, it seems as if all the windows of the world are thrown open and everything is as clear as on a morning after rain. Silence, ideally, hums. It charges the air. In Tibet, where the silence has a tragic cause, it is still quickened by the fluttering of prayer flags, the tolling of temple bells, the roar of wind across the plains, the memory of chant.
To be continued
Gonzalinho
PICO IYER ON SILENCE
DeleteContinued
Silence, then, could be said to be the ultimate province of trust: it is the place where we trust ourselves to be alone; where we trust others to understand the things we do not say; where we trust a higher harmony to assert itself. We all know how treacherous are words, and how often we use them to paper over embarrassment, or emptiness, or fear of the larger spaces that silence brings. “Words, words, words” commit us to positions we do not really hold, the imperatives of chatter; words are what we use for lies, false promises and gossip. We babble with strangers; with intimates we can be silent. We “make conversation” when we are at a loss; we unmake it when we are alone, or with those so close to us that we can afford to be alone with them.
In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.
https://time.com/archive/6722238/the-eloquent-sounds-of-silence/
—Pico Iyer, “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence,” Time (January 25, 1993)
Silence is the stuff of great literature, because words cannot do the subject justice. Masters of the art of writing rise to the challenge who are bound to fail yet, ironically, also succeed. When they struggle to embellish their muse, testing their limits, they, surprisingly, exceed their idiom.
Poets the likes of Kahlil Gibran, Pablo Neruda, or Billy Collins belong to this pantheon of winning failures.
Pico Iyer, consummate essayist, dispenses his musings seemingly effortlessly on the subject. He invokes irony—silence is “not emptiness but repletion”…metaphor— “silence is an ecumenical state”…parallelism and inversion—“if idleness is the devil’s playground, silence may be the angels’”…assorted figures of speech, artfully pirouetting. His insights, hors d’oeuvres suddenly noticed, are served up in small bites—“we have to earn silence…to work for it”; “silence is an anagram of license”; “silence, ideally, hums.” His lyricism assigns to silence a place of reverence it naturally claims by merit of its own muteness.
Gonzalinho
Photo courtesy of William M. Connolley
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moeraki-boulder-split_b.jpg
Gonzalinho
Silence is a habit we are sometimes compelled to break and most reluctantly at that.
ReplyDeleteGonzalinho