By Fr. Eugene Hemrick
Yeshua Fellow
“A wise old owl sat on an oak;
The more he saw the less he spoke;
The less he spoke the more he heard;
Why aren't we like that wise old bird?”
Our wise old owl raises a fundamental question, “What makes silence so significant?”
The Latin word for silence is silens, meaning to be still, quiet or at rest. Stillness is the tranquility of inner life, the quiet at the depths of its hidden streams. It is a collected, total presence and being “all there” -- receptive alert, ready.
It is when the soul abandons the restlessness of purposeful activity.
In German, Wahrnehmen means the reception of truth. Through silence we are enabled to behold the truth, consume it, and make it one within us.
Kahlil Gibran's description of silence captures its overwhelming pleasure.
But now I have learned to listen to silence,
To hear its choirs singing the song of ages,
Chanting the hymns of space and disclosing the secrets of eternity.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh speaks of a postmodern malaise that is forever threatening silence’s beauty.
We seem so frightened of being alone that we never let it happen … We choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill space. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place.
In Power and Responsibility, author Romano Guardini concurs with Lindbergh and suggests what is needed to safeguard silence.
First, we must try to rediscover something of what is called the contemplative attitude, actually experience it ourselves, not just talk about it interestingly. All around us we see activity, organization, operations of every possible type, but what directs them? An innerness no longer really at home within itself, which thinks, judges, acts from the surface, guided by mere intellect, utility, and the impulses of power, property, and pleasure. An ‘interiority’ too superficial to contact the truth lying at life’s center, which no longer reaches the essential and everlasting, but remains somewhere just under the skin-level of the provisional and the fortuitous … Before all else, then, man’s depth must be reawakened. His life must again include times, his day moments of stillness in which he collects himself, spreads out before his heart the problems which have stirred him during the day. In a word, man must learn again to meditate and to pray. He must become all there, opening his mind and heart wide to some word of piety or wisdom, of ethical honor, whether he takes it from Scripture or Plato, from Goethe or Jeremias Gotthelf.
Losing our contemplative edge suggests a critical question: Is there an alarming correlation between a growing number of disturbed people and their inability to cultivate silence? Is our age’s emphasis on perpetual motion and commotion eroding our quality of life? Is today’s existence losing its lifegiving depth?”
As Lent approaches, perhaps it is a good time to spend more time in and with silence.