“Listen to the Silence”

Grammatically speaking, it would seem to be a contradiction, an oxymoron.  How can you listen to silence if "silence" means the absence of sound?  And yet it was the first thing my wife said to me when we got out of the car upon arriving at Big Bend National Park in Texas.  Few other tourists had arrived yet for the coming weekend, and we were many miles from any city.  "Listen to the silence," she said.

And I knew exactly what she meant because I "heard" it myself.  I heard how quiet it was. The absence of even any distant noise from cars on any highways was what made it so striking.  The irony was that because there was nothing to hear, we were listening more attentively.

In our increasingly technological (and increasingly urbanized) lives, silence is counter-cultural, almost radically so.  We have so many forms of electronic entertainment and communication that we are almost constantly receiving or sending sounds or messages.  To be silent and to listen to silence is rare.

The more important question, however, is not why our silence is rare, but instead, why is it so important?  And why might Nature be a key to obtaining it?

Part of the answer is that silence is a door into attentiveness.  If a friend is talking to me, I can better attend to what they are expressing if I listen silently, rather than looking for an opening to inject the busy thoughts of my own mind.  In parallel with that principle, the 20th-century spiritual director Evelyn Underhill taught that to be prayerful, a person had to be attentive.  Silence and attentiveness can lead to prayerfulness.

Many objects in the natural world emit no sound.  Thus, to truly attend to them -- to "listen" to them in silence -- can be a good way of becoming meditative.  This is one of the gifts of Nature.

We might expect to find in Mother Teresa's writings only thoughts about her ministry to the poor in India, but she knew the secret of this connection between silence and Nature.  She wrote:

"See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, 

how they move in silence.  We need silence 

to be able to touch souls."

There is also a link between inner silence and appreciating beauty.  The symmetries, colors, and harmonies in Nature that we experience as beauty can be a window into the Divine.  However, as Henry David Thoreau reminds us:

"You cannot perceive beauty
but with a serene mind."

~~~

Is there some way you have of coming to a greater inner serenity?  What is that way?

(The Mother Teresa quote is from A Gift for God
by Mother Teresa, © 1975, p. 69.
The Thoreau quote is from

 his Journal X, Vol. 16, Nov. 18, 1857.)