This morning as I left the house at 6:25am, my eyes were drawn upwards to the moonlit, starry sky. And all the world seemed still, silent, at peace with itself.
Here's a good piece reminding me of the true value of silence.
People who live in cities almost never experience silence. There is always something -- traffic in the distance, the chatter of neighbours, a far-off siren, even the white noise of office buildings.
Yet it is a mistake to think of silence as the absence of noise. Silence is not a negative, not an absence at all, but an overwhelming presence, an awesome something that brings sustaining and resuscitating gifts all the more precious for their rarity. Silence is a wonder for all the faces that it has, all the garments that it wears, the nuances and qualities that come with it: the silence of a starlit night in a wilderness; the silence of a deserted church, empty yet holy, the engulfing silence of fresh snow, the silence that passes in a glance between a loving couple, running like electricity through a wire. All different. All magical.
Check out the rest of it here.
I like the last paragraph:
ReplyDelete"To seek silence is to seek God; to love silence, to learn the beauty of stillness, is to invite
God to touch us and our lives. And in silence, in this private, internal wilderness that we create, God finds us, as he once found the prophets, and speaks to us in ways that can enlighten, inspire or confound. That is another mystery, another level of communication, another place. A silent place is a holy place if only we can learn to hear and love that mystical nothingness that is everything. "
I wish there was more time for this in my life - especially right now. Sometimes I feel like my retreating into silence is a bit of an escape mechanism and sort of feel guilty for it.