“We can study endless maps of the pathways into the silent land. But the map is not the territory. To discover the actual land of silence requires not information but the silence of God that is the very ground of the mind and that causes us to seek in the first place.”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), page 76.
“In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with his mind and lips, but in a certain sense with his whole being. Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart–it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958. (pbk ed 1999), p. 40.
This is how we can finally get away from the Sears-catalog-Amazon-wish-list type of prayer that so many Christians are boxed in by.
“Silence is not simply about the absence of sound waves. It is concerned with attention and awareness. Silence and awareness are in fact one thing.”
Laird, Martin. A Sunlit Absence : Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 44.
“In suffering, exasperation may get the better of us, but it is important to keep silent by remaining in the presence of God.” Thought 338.
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 175.
“In fact, silence can make it possible to survive in the most precarious situations. Tortures, ill treatment, and torments, however diabolical they may be, will start to be calmed by a silence that is directed toward God. In a mysterious but real way, he supports us by suffering with us. He is inseparably united to man in all his tribulations; it is one thing to rebel against God because he remained silent during our sufferings; it is another thing to entrust our suffering to him in silence, to offer it to him so that he might transform it into an instrument of salvation by associating it with Christ’s suffering.”
Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017. Thought 318. p. 166.
“Aligning contemplative practices with this self-awareness brings about incredible personal liberation. Taking time to pause and create a spirituality marked by solitude, silence, and stillness reminds us who we truly are, in the best sense of our True Self.”
Heuertz, Christopher L. The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2017, p. 181.
When I first copied this note, I titled it “freedom in and from contemplation.” I don’t know now whether I meant ‘from’ as in ‘as a result of’ or as in ‘that protects us against.’ Maybe both senses of ‘from’ work. I mean, we don’t want to just pile on another legalism that demands we do contemplative practice this way or not at all. Where would the Gospel be in that?
"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, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004, p. 110.
“The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why not a few abandon a contemplative practice like meditation as soon as it begins to expose this wound; they move on instead to some spiritual entertainment that will maintain distraction. Perhaps this is why the weak and wounded, who know very well the vulnerability of the human condition, often have an aptitude for discovering silence and can sense the wholeness and healing that ground this wound.”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. NY: Oxford University Press, 200, p. 117.
“But it is terribly important to keep silence. When? Almost all the rest of the day. It is essential that priests learn how to silence all their routine declarations of truths that they have not yet troubled to think about. If we said only what we really meant we would say very little. Yet we have to preach God too. Exactly. Preaching the word of God implies silence. If preaching is not born of silence, it is a waste of time.” (8 January 1950)
Merton, Thomas. The Sign of Jonas. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981, page 266. (originally published 1953)
Keeping silent is a difficult thing for some people. But it is at least as important and necessary as speaking the right word at the right time.
Writing here, Merton was thinking specifically of preachers who speak the sermon or homily in a service of worship. I’m pretty sure that he would agree, though, that all of us regularly ‘preach’ with our actions, and in our daily conversations and social media posts. [okay, so first we would have to explain “social media” to him]
And I would agree that silence is golden. That we simply do not have to always throw in our 2 cents worth. That we do not have to reply to social media. That we do not always need to explain ourselves, defend ourselves, attack the other, or argue our way through the day.
“Great spiritual men are often speechless and spend their days in silence. They live in the revelation of the mystery. They live in what takes them out of themselves so as to make them enter into the mystery of God.” Thought 92. (p. 60)
Sarah, Robert Cardinal. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), page 60.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 