Dear Brothers and Sisters:  

As we prepare to enter the Sacred Season of Lent in a few weeks, I would like to share with you some thoughts on silence which should be a part of our Lenten journey.

Silence is more than the absence of noise. It is more than just tuning out noise and sound around us. It needs to be creative. Peter Minard writes: “Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.”  We enter into quiet and stillness to find our inner sanctuary. What is a sanctuary but a sacred place? A sanctuary is the sacred area of a church around its tabernacle. Jesus, the Son of God, resides in every tabernacle on earth and when we enter into silence and our own inner tabernacle, we are able to meet our Lord once again. Yet in that inner sanctuary we are often uncomfortable, nervous, on edge.  How often do we flip on the radio or the music to drown out the “raging silence” that is all around us? We fill up our inner beings with other things – good things in moderation – instead of allowing the Lord to fill up our inmost self.

Thomas Merton writes: “If we are afraid of being alone, afraid of silence, it is perhaps because of our secret despair of inner reconciliation.”  Perhaps we don’t want to meet our God. Perhaps we are afraid of what He has to say to us. Perhaps we don’t want to hear where He is asking us to go, where we need to change, where we need to let go. If we can keep the busy-ness of noise around us then we don’t need to go to our inner sanctuary and meet our God. No need to follow, no need to change, no need to reconcile with God if we never hear Him. Later Merton writes, “In silence we face and admit that gap between the depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is so often untrue to our own reality.”

But we are an active Church, and we are a social people. We are not called to be a group of hermits who never speak. We are a community of brothers and sisters with a call to genuine sharing of ourselves on a human level. We need to be able to speak to proclaim the Good News. We need to be able to discuss with one another so that the community can be built up. Again to quote Merton, “We are perhaps too talkative, too activistic, in our conception of the Christian life. Our service of God and of the church does not consist only in talking and doing. It can also consist in periods of silence, listening, waiting.”

There is a time and place for everything under the heavens. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak (Ecclesiastes 3:7b). We can find a million and one reasons on why we need to speak, why we need to have noise but are they reasons or excuses?  Because again if we are quiet and still, we might encounter the Lord. Isaiah 30:15 reads: “For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel: By waiting and by calm you shall be saved, in quiet and in trust your strength lies. But this you did not wish.”  Again, it is more than the absence of noise, silence is the gift to simply be and do nothing.

The practice of silence and the willingness to listen helps the self-giving love of Christ to replace the frenetic self-improvement of the world. God does not operate at the speed of light, but in the easily ignored gentle whisper (cf. 1 Kings 19: 12). The habits of silence and stillness are an invitation to back away from the noise and chaos that the world praises and into a more attentive and responsive life. Perhaps in this Lenten season our habits can be defined not by what we give up, but what we pay more attention to.

In the Spirit of the Redeemer, 

Paul J. Borowski, C.Ss.R.