Thoughts on Silence

If our Life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say we shall be left speechless...


Our lives are so cluttered with words that we no longer know how to handle silence. Silence for all too many of us is simply a fruitless pause between words rather that a creative silence out of which deep and authentic words can emerge. Sated with words, we do not realize that we are starved for silence. Having lost the sense of our need for silence, we tend to fill the silence we have with the noise of our radios and our televisions. Words and noises conspire to block silence out of our lives and, all too often, we are parties to the conspiracy...

Authentic silence is pregnant with words that will be born at the right time. But unless our words rise out of silence, they are apt to be curtains that cover reality rather than windows which reveal it.

-Thomas Merton

we do not realize that we are starved for silence!