WHERE HAS ALL THE SILENCE GONE?

Many, many years ago when I was in seminary, the time between when the lights went out until after breakfast was called The Grand Silence. We were not permitted to talk save only to God during that time. That does not mean that we always obeyed that rule, but it was enforced in the breach. There were others periods of silence throughout the day back then. Two or three days a week all meals were eaten in silence, the only sound being the clinking of the silverware on the plates and the voice of the one reading from a book.

The Grand Silence was a rule, but it was more than that. It was meant to be a spiritual discipline because the authorities knew that it was truly only in silence that we could orient ourselves to grow in our spiritual life. I suspect we all realized that truth even as we often rebelled against it simply because we wanted to perceive it more as a rule that had to be kept than a discipline that needed to be cultivated.

Perhaps it was because of those enforced periods of silence that, paradoxically I suppose, I came not to resent them but to appreciate them especially now as I wonder where has all the silence gone. Now it seems that there is more noise than silence, where silence is avoided, actively avoided. We seem to be quite uncomfortable with it. And so we have to have some noise in the background just to keep going.

Granted, some of what we play in the background to drown out the silence would never be considered noise but are in fact musical masterpieces. Nevertheless, Mozart and Beethoven notwithstanding, silence is still silence.  And in order to both appreciate the joy and the necessity of silence we not only have to be silent, we also have to be still.

What is so ironic about all this is that the place where silence is the most helpful to our spiritual lives is the one where it seems to be the most uncomfortable for us: worship. There are various places in our worship where we are encouraged to remain silent in order to reflect upon what we have just heard – after each of the readings, after the sermon, between prayers.

The difficulty in making periods of silence available is that we do not know how to take advantage of them. Thirty seconds of silence seems like an hour; a minute seems like an eternity. The truth is that it takes much longer than that to even get into the mode and the mood. It takes discipline, which is what my seminary was trying to get through our thick and reluctant skulls.

Lent is a special time in our spiritual lives, a time to become more disciplined in our spiritual lives. Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to ourselves this Lent is to make some time each day just to be still and be silent in order to be alone with ourselves and our God. We need both quality time and quantity time – fifteen minutes minimum.

It will take time to get into taking time, to enjoy and then relish the silence, to discover how important it is. Just making the time may be the most difficult part of it all. But if we do, in the end we will be most thankful and better for it.