Day Twenty-Eight | March 25 Silence TWENTY-EIGHT

Years ago, as a part of my ordination process, I was required to go on a spiritual retreat. And it’s a funny thing to say: that I was forced to be “spiritual” – but that’s another topic for another time. Through a bizarre sequence of errors (most of them were actually my fault), I wound up registering for a week-long spiritual retreat at a monastery down in south Texas – a week-long silent retreat. Surrounded by a thousand acres of nothingness, the setting was the perfect environment for silence. There was no cell service, no distractions, no lights, no noise. But the outside of that experience betrayed nothing of the inside of it: the hardship of silence. For a week, surrounded by sheer nothingness, I was forced – or, maybe, allowed – to confront all the clamor inside of me: all my insecurity, all my fear. There was no place to hide. No excuse to o er. All there was, was silence – deep, penetrating, deafening silence. All there was, was silence … and God.

And, to be honest, I have to confess that it took me about three days to actually hear Him. It took about 72 hours to “detox” from all the noise – all the voices and all the whispers in my head – to finally hear the “still small voice” of the Sustainer. But when He spoke, things changed. I changed.

There is a sacred rhythm that God created between silence and noise: God created the universe by speaking: the great silence of nothingness shattered by the eruption of sun and moon, and star and earth. And when creation was complete, God rested in silence … and He commanded us to do the same: to remember and to reflect on what He’d done.

Yes, there are times God speaks through angels and thunder and burning bushes; but many times, God speaks in silence. In fact, the wise amongst us have always sought the balance between silence and din. King Solomon wrote that there is “a time to keep silent and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:7) – and discernment knows the di erence. Jesus retreated from the crush of the crowds; He escaped the questions of the disciples to be still and silent, to reconnect with God – with God, who meets us in the stillness; with God, who sustains us by the silence.

But do we know its power – the sacred power of silence? Silence that convicts, silence that confronts, silence that compels our broken hearts toward Home. Just because we don’t hear the Lord’s dulcet voice does not mean that He is absent. It just means that He does not move amidst the noise – the noise that distracts, the noise the deters, the noise that would deaden our ears to wonder. It just means that we must train our souls to heed the silence, for it has much to say.