I was gifted with a couple of books this weekend. (people know me sooo well.) On the bus today, I opened Joan Chittister’s Illuminated Life from Orbis books:
Silence frightens us because it is silence that brings us face to face with ourselves. Silence is a very perilous part of life. It tells us what we’re obsessing about. It reminds us of what we have not resolved within ourselves, from which there is no escape, which no amount of cosmetics can hide, that no amount of money or titles or power can possibly cure. Silence leaves us with only ourselves for company.
Silence is, in other words, life’s greatest teacher. It shows us what we have yet to become, and how much we lack to become it. “Wherever I am,” the poet Mark Strand writes, “I am what’s missing.”
Silence, the contemplative knows, is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul. It is the cave through which the soul must travel, clearing out the dissonance of life as we go, so that the God who is waiting there for us to notice can fill us.
To be a contemplative we must . . . go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisperer, not a storm.
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Joan Chittister’s From Where I Stand columns
photo: brother jacob
