Just as God speaks to us through the words of scripture, so God speaks to us through the elements of creation. The cosmos is like a living sacred text that we can learn to read and interpret. Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice, and as other traditions study their sacred texts, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God.
WISHING YOU DEEP BLESSINGS in and of the Silence, dear friends! Listening in the Silence, we receive rest and renewal from the plethora of noise, words, and massive distractions in eery area of daily life. More than ever we NEED many quiet pauses during each day for our physical well-being, our peace of mind, and our spiritual nourishment. Wise are those who companion with Silence regularly. Let the still, small Voice within be a guide.
We are all joined in the holiness of the mind that God created. I therefore never consider myself one in the silence. I'm 88 and live alone in a four room house surrounded by open space. I have no TV and have always luxuriated in silence. The exterior silence is here. The interior silence is a work in progress.
We need to "find" God, who cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is a friend of silence. The more we engage in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us.
Before we determine what God wants to hear from us, we need to think about keeping still in order to hear from God. Our culture is drowning in noise. Such a culture cries out for a ministry of silence. It needs to re-learn that silence is an indispensible discipline of the spiritual life . . . to discover the voice of Love speaks most powerfully in the still small voice of silence.
~ from THE JOY OF WORSHIP by Marianne H. Micks, thanks to B. Goyer
Fasting from words, fasting from a volume of speech, being willing to humbly accept the yoke of silence and quietude deprives the tongue of the mastery of our hearts and minds. The tongue is a very useful tool for the art of love and for the art of prayer, but it is also the means by which we afflict others and even our own selves so often. So it must be called into holy obedience.
