Words from Silence -S. Thomas Berg
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. –Psalm 19:3-4
Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins from The Habit of Perfection
I have occasion to go to Ephphatha House. It’s a small Catholic community in the country.
There is a chapel there I like to sit in. Here I find silence. Thick silence. Silence that leaves
my ears ringing. It’s the kind of silence that detoxifies rather than brings relief. Perhaps one
day it will bring relief but for now this silence feels too much like loss and death. But these
times in the desert are what I need and so I come back, again and again.
In our age with its backdrop of white noise most of us know that we need time for silence.
And yet half-consciously we continue to arrange things to keep us insulated from silence. We
live uncomfortably with the dissonance and yet we are uneasy with any lull.
The silence that we fear is not just the absence of the audible. We fear true silence because it
begins with chilling emptiness and progresses to loud inner moiling. So why would we put
ourselves through this? Because by grace as we battle through the barriers and suffer the
small deaths, and then as we finally lay listening with every fiber of our being, we hear the
soft footfalls of God approaching.
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