The Spiritual Healing Presence of Silence

We are a society that has overdosed on media, both visual and auditory. I don’t know about you, but I tend to tune most of it out. What then replaces it? Do we have something better to see and hear? Are we really comfortable with just silence? I suspect most people just let their own babble go on in their heads instead of taking a break, letting go and enjoying silence. Here is an article by Father Gabriel Rochelle, a priest of the St. Anthony of the Dominican Orthodox Mission in Las Cruces, New Mexico who suggests we find the spiritual healing presence of silence and the voice of our hearts.

The Spiritual Healing Presence of Silence

The novelist and essayist Pico Iyer wrote, "We have to earn silence, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. We all know how treacherous are words, and how often we use them to paper over embarrassment, or emptiness, or fear of the larger spaces that silence brings. 'Words, words, words' commit us to positions we do not really hold, the imperatives of chatter; words are what we use for lies, false promises and gossip." Iyer is onto truth in this Time magazine essay from Jan. 25, 1993, but I think it incomplete; what I miss is the note that genuine speech emerges out of true silence even as true silence issues forth in authentic speaking. Thus are the lies avoided, thus do we become truly present, and thus does the soul speak.
The world is full of babble. It surrounds us on all sides, seeps into our lives via a host of media: radio, television and now the other devices that invade our space and rob our silence. Words have become cheaper than ever before, it seems, and hence we distrust the voice.
For many people in our society, the retreat to silence means only absence and not possibility, only void and not creative center. We have been so long drawn off silence by noise that surrounds us that we think we are hollow when noise and words are absent. It is not so.
We still have time to find that heart where the voice originates, where the soul can be expressed through the voice. Every spiritual tradition presents a way into silence through contemplation, meditation or prayer. Find it in yours or find someone to help you enter it. The world is in need of authentic speech.
To read more of this passage click here.

Paul Simon years ago wrote the song, “Sounds of Silence”. If you truly take a break from the hubbub of your modern life you might discover true peace of mind or even the solution to that problem you have been trying to resolve, maybe a great invention or a way to resolve differences with on old friend. It’s sort of a defragmenting of the brain, a type of walking meditation to find the spiritual healing presence of silence. I will stop now as there is also too much written nonsense. I’ve said enough. However, I’d love to hear from you, so please leave a message below.