It begins and ends in silence. It begins and ends in the silence of God. It begins in the dark silence of God moving over the dark face of the waters. It ends in the bright silence of the empty tomb and the bright face of the angelic gardener. Then it begins again, life does, in the silent realization of Mary the Magdalene, the woozy joy rushing up the stairs from her heart to her head as she looks upon a discarded burial garment then dashes down the dusty road to tell her friends of her eureka. It ends, like Jesus’ ascended body, transformed in the singing silence and the unending praise of heaven.[i] In other words, life ends in a perpetual new beginning.

Life and prayer begin and end in silence. In life, silence is not the absence of sound any more than in prayer silence is the absence of God. Like the mystics who know the sound of silence, the potency and inadequacy of words, the impossibility of naming God, and the persistent irony of life, we must use many not few words or at least many metaphors and images to speak of silence, so simple and yet so multifarious are its meanings and ways.

For persons interested in self-understanding and participating in the liturgy of life, for those spiritual guides and pastoral ministers charged with the responsibility of accompanying others in their search for life or love or connection or meaning or God, silence is the soil of the soul, the black ground where our deepest personhood, rooted in God, gestates and grows. The poet Rilke writes:

In spite of all the farmer’s work and worry,
he can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly

transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.[ii]

Silence is the dark, rich soil where awareness, attention, appreciation, and sympathetic action are awakened and nurtured. It is silence that bestows summer from a seed.♦

Blessings Good people — Dan

Source: Daniel J. Miller, [from a work in progress on Listening], © 2009.

PRACTICE:

Think of yourself as the gardener of your own soul. Tend to the soil in which the soul buds and blossoms by nurturing silence, by cultivating a listening heart.

[i] See Thomas Merton, The Springs of Contemplation, 7, and Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence ch. 1 third P?.
[ii] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in “Sonnets to Orpheus,” translated by Stephen Mitchell.