Sound is the voice of the Created.
Silence is the voice of the Creator.
Listen loudly. Speak in whispers.
-~ author unknown

Because our theme this year is LISTEN LOUDLY, it is necessarily a year of entering into the silence. Silence is not absolutely necessary for listening but silence makes deep listening possible. Among other questions, we will consider what we do with silence and what silence does with us if we let it. It is a year we will intentionally practice being silent which means both settling into the silence around us and paying attention to the silence that settles deeply within us. We will consider both listening to the silence and listening from the silence and the role these intentional, grace-filled actions play in forming and transforming us as people of faith who are quick to listen and ready to hear. It is a year to consciously cultivate a listening heart and the silence that enlivens, nourishes, sustains and directs that heart. Finally, it is a year in which we will reflect on what and to whom we need to be listening in order for our lives to be authentic, substantive, attentive, and compassionate, lives grounded in love and offered as a gift to others.

As I wrote in a post a few years ago, “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 ways.

For persons interested in self-understanding and participating in the liturgy of life, 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.

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” (See November 27, 2009).

REFLECTION / PRACTICE:
Be a seed. Make some time today– five minutes or thirty or an hour. It’s not a competition. No one is keeping score– make some time today to be a seed settled in the soil of silence.