Prayer and Deepest Sympathy

Silence

Maybe this Season of Creation has been an opportunity for you to explore silence in nature ? Maybe the coming holidays will be a time for you to be, and enjoy silence ?

The following reflection by Jim Quillinan explores the transformational power of silence and its importance in our busy lives. Over the term break may you have time to experience deep silence and its capacity to nourish your spirit.

There is nothing that resembles God so much as silence. Meister Eckhardt Silence is a complex word – it can mean absence from speech, or perhaps being unaware of the noise or sound that surrounds us or it could mean being sent to Coventry, as it were, never mentioned or spoken to or about. It could mean the silence that surrounds secrecy. It can be a verb – creating stillness, silencing others. Then there is the punitive silence which perhaps every parent and teacher has used at times. We use silence to encourage the transgressor to own up! There are awkward or perhaps painful silences where no-one knows what to say, perhaps in responding to times of grief and anxiety, or the comfortable silence where we are at peace, where we feel that words are not needed at this moment. That is perhaps best described as companionable silence. It might even be described as the experience of being loved. 

If we think about it, the silence that brings us closer to the sacred is perhaps a combination of most of those.