At a conference on the Iranian poet Hafez I attended recently, one of the older Persian speakers suddenly leaned forward to the audience and said, "Make your work The Face of the Beloved, and let what you create be her lashes, her mole, her lips." To do that would mean carrying all these gifts, letting the radiance of the World beyond the world shine into each cottage door you come to. Doing so requires both huge strength and the capacity for a kind of visible luminosity, an active principle that can only be born from a great stillness.
In order to listen to God's silence we must escape the din of distractions that normally deafen us to it. Being deafened to the silence within as well as the silence without is corrosive to God-hearing. To be silent is to so empty oneself of the din of transitory distractions that one becomes fully receptive to the silence that always and everywhere underlies them. Silence is that state of spiritual sensitivity in which seekers make themselves available to the silence of God's voice.
~ from SPIRITUALITY OF THE HANDMAID, by Kerry Walters
