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[Silence can] say what words cannot. It can express intimacy so deep that speech becomes superfluous. It can portray a love so close that voices become obsolete. That silence is not emptiness. It is filled with the ineffable. Some words are only placeholders for things too divine to explain.
via Words/Love.
FOR MONTHS I’ve noticed that the most often visited post on this blog is Silence and that email correspondence ex-blog is, more often than not, silence / retreat / prayer or meditation-related. And a feature in our parish life that binds people at every stage in life, from children to the very elderly, is our shared times of silence. Monthly Monday Meditation (half an hour’s shared silence for meditation with one simple spoken prayer for blessing before departure in silence) has been one of our biggest and most consistent growth points for more than 12 months in a row. Many, many people – writing from every corner of the globe – tell me of their desire to seek out ways of being more fully inclusive, to break down “walls that divide”, to find (or better to celebrate having found) a deeper communion. There’s an appetite, a hunger, all over the world, for silence. I love this photograph (Vega, Fuerteventura, Islas Canarias) because, years after making the image, I can “hear” the silence I encountered at the time. The only sound around in those mountains was the high-song of a tiny shrike.
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Why is the world searching for silence? My blogging friend, Francesca Zelnick, Words/Love, with her tremendous gift for finding the right word even when her subject is no words, seems to me to have struck gold: [Silence] “is filled with the ineffable. Some words are only placeholders for things too divine to explain.”
Meditatio Podcast here | The World Community for Christian Meditation here
not ready for silence just now? Try Flying – “close your eyes” by Mira Shvangiradze
Silence in the City video here
