The Sound of Silence

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”  Matthew 6:6

Growing up as a child in India, I would listen to music with my father and brother on our stereo.  Even though my father was born in the 1940s, and loved the music of his generation, he also took a liking to some of music of the 1960s, including Simon and Garfunkel.  One of their most popular songs, The Sound of Silence, served as critique for the lack of communication between people, communities, and nations in an age of increasing strife and civil unrest: “… People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share, And no one dared, Disturb the sound of silence.”

While silence can be a sign of a lack of communication, it can also serve it.  A certain amount of silence is needed for us to hear another’s voice.  Recently, I was at a reception, and there was so much music and background noise from other conversations, that I could not hear the person speaking with me.

When it comes to prayer, silence serves the conversation.

Jesus does not give us a lot of instruction.  Like much of His teaching, He is concise and simple.  And while He does not mention silence directly, it is clearly implied: “… when you pray, go into your inner room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret …” (Mt 6:6).  This can be interpreted in two ways.  First, it can be interpreted literally.  Retreat from the activity of the day into a peaceful, quiet physical place where you can turn to God without distraction.

It can also be understood figuratively, as in going into the “room” of one’s heart.  It is at the level of the heart that we meet God, but in order to get to that place we must retreat from living on the surface, with all its trivialities, noise, and distractions.  We need the sound of silence.

Silence seems to have become a lot more difficult to find.  Much of the reason is found in our new technology, which like most technology, comes with both blessings and curses.  I am often surprised at the end of a week when I look at my usage report for my cell phone and how much time I have spent on it.  The same challenge is before most of us, which is why Pope Francis suggested that we give up time on our devices for Lent.

A friend of mine, commenting on a trend in our culture, rhetorically asked me last week, “How did we get to be so fragile?”  Perhaps there are a variety of reasons, but among them is that we are not being attentive to matters of the soul.  We are driven to live life on the shallow surface, and without attention, matters of depth and importance to our happiness and resilience do not develop. We can often forget the most important relationship which sustains and strengthens us—our friendship with the Father.  We must attend to the soul.  Which is why Jesus tells us to pray … with the sound of silence.

The silence of the Creator is thunderous,

Drowning out everything else,

And hiding in endless creativity.

—Thomas Keating, “Out of a Stone”

One of Thomas Keating’s greatest legacies will surely be his development and teaching of Centering Prayer, a Christian form of silent meditation. It has been my (Richard’s) preferred method of prayer for decades and I recommend it to anyone seeking to enter more deeply into the mystery of God. In today’s meditation, Cynthia Bourgeault explores a profound teaching on silence found within Keating’s poem “Out of a Stone,” excerpted above.

A theme that continues in all the poems contained in The Secret Embrace is that silence is not absence, but presence. It is a “something,” not a nothing. It has substantiality, heft, force. You can lean into it, and it leans back. It meets you; it holds you up.

That’s hardly how it’s understood in our culture at large, of course, where silence is typically seen as “vacant space,” waiting to be filled up with content. We try to cram every “empty” moment full. Even when we begin a meditation practice, this preference for content remains, and we will often approach silence as a kind of inner desert, a place of inner uncovering, which we enter to hear “messages from God.” It’s the messages that most grab us at the start; we’re all ears for whatever new insight emerges out of the silence.

Gradually, as we progress in Centering Prayer—or in any meditation practice, for that matter—we begin to reorient. Centering Prayer’s instructions to let go of all thoughts, regardless of content, directs us back to the silence itself, and we gradually learn the shape of the new terrain. As we stop grabbing for content, we gradually discover that silence does indeed have depth, presence, shape, even sound. As we mature in Centering Prayer, the perception that the emptiness is in fact the presence becomes more and more palpable. Thomas Keating encourages us that this “sound of silence” keeps right on growing. By his own later stage in the journey, it has become “thunderous.”

In fact—says Thomas—this “thunderous” silence is actually the most intense, concentrated “dosage” of divine presence we can bear face-to-face. In a paradoxical way, the dance of creation, beautiful and enchanting as it is, is like a veil over the face of the naked presence of God—like the veil that hides the Holy of Holies in the temple. These two faces of God—veiled and unveiled—live in symbiotic unity, and out of that unity everything pours into existence in a cascade of sheer delight.

For Thomas, creativity is “the diffuse shining of God” (to borrow a striking image from that other celebrated contemporary Thomas, Thomas Merton). [1] It’s what allows us to know our Creator not only in the “thunderous” silence of [God’s] direct presence, but in the dance of life itself. Either or both ways are fine, for they spill unceasingly into one another. From this “veiled embrace” between pure silence and joyful creativity at the very heart of all creation, flows life in all its beauty, goodness, fluidity, and magical wonder.

References:

1.  Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” Ramparts Magazine (March 1963), 69. See In the Dark before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, ed. Lynn R. Szabo (New Directions: 2005), 68.

2. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-sound-of-silence-2020-10-20/