“The silence that brings us close to God is always a respectful silence, a silence of adoration, a silence of filial love. It is never a trivial silence.”
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 206.
“Silence does not mean dumbness, as speech does not mean chatter. Dumbness does not create solitude and chatter does not create fellowship.”
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954, p. 78. (original German pub in 1939)
"At first the quiet may feel like just another place of emptiness. We may even feel a sense of dread or fear that we are going to be judged or punished for parts of ourselves we have now brought into the light of day.
“But if we stay in this moment, eventually – like Elijah – we begin to notice that this silence is qualitatively different from the emptiness we experienced before. The silence that comes after the chaos is pregnant with the presence of God.”
Barton, Ruth Haley. Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004, p. 110.
“In genuine contemplation one normally begins with quiet and detached intuitions, simple peace, interior silence. There is little or no preoccupation with self. If one finds himself reflecting too much on himself, he instinctively breaks the false absorption by turning to a book, a picture, or some external reality or, interiorly, to some objective thought. The contemplative, too, on a bad day, can fall into a daze. But it takes the form of weariness and sleep. His deepest absorption is not trancelike, but something clean and wakeful, with nothing strained or pathological about it.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003, pp. 112-113.
"The greatest of God’s secrets is God Himself.
“He waits to communicate Himself to me in a way that I can never express to others or even think about coherently to myself. I must desire it in silence. It is for this that I must leave all things.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958 (pbk ed 1999), p. 123.
Since God reaches out to and loves each of us individually, it makes sense that He reveals Himself to each of us in individual ways, personal ways, ways that are hard for us to talk about because they are so deeply meaningful. We all need to pay attention.
“The final dynamic of spiritual disciplines is prayer. Prayer is the outgrowth of both silence and solitude. In silence we let go of our manipulative control. In solitude we face up to what we are in the depths of our being. Prayer then becomes the offering of who we are to God: the giving of that broken, unclean, grasping, manipulative self to God for the work of God’s grace in our lives.”
Mulholland, M. Robert, Jr. Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation. Foreword, Practices and Study Guide by Ruth Haley Barton. Expanded edition. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016, p. 161.
"The beginner’s dryness in prayer is actually God’s grace and invitation to simpler prayer. John of the Cross offers some signs that the beginner is called to a simpler form of prayer: discursive meditation becomes hard and wearisome; our interior and exterior images of God no longer inspire devotion; we find pleasure in being alone and feel the attraction to wait with ‘loving awareness of God,’ without any particular meditation and inner peace, rest and quietness.
"In light of John of the Cross’s signs, we must never become a slave to any prayer technique and allow it to get in the way of our relationship with God. …
“As in any other relationship, as we grow and become more and more comfortable with God, we become more and more comfortable with silence. The silence is not empty or dead in any way whatsoever; it is a silence pregnant with a loving history between lover and beloved. And so we should always follow the silence whenever God’s grace offers the invitation.”
Haase, Albert. Coming Home to Your True Self: Leaving the Emptiness of False Attractions. Foreword by M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2008, pp. 158-159.
Comment: to quote another theologian, “this is most certainly true.”
“Silence is the privilege of courageous persons. They may fall and lose hope; silence will unceasingly be able to lift them up again because it bears within it a divine presence and a divine origin. Silence is a conversion that is never accomplished easily.” Thought 129.
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. Translated by Michael J. Miller. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 74.
“We are built for contemplation. This book is about cultivating the skills necessary for this subtlest, simplest, and most searching of the spiritual arts. Communion with God in the silence of the heart is a God-given capacity, like the rhododendron’s capacity to flower…”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. NY: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 1.
“The ears with which one hears the message of the Gospel are hidden in man’s heart, and these ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958. (pbk ed 1999), Preface, pp. xii-xiii.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 