Silence

Be Silent

Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. The spirituality the Desert Fathers deeply influenced Celtic spirituality. For these ascetics, silence was the teacher: "A certain brother came to the abbott Moses in Scete seeking a word from him. And the old man said to him, 'Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you all things.' " In the Celtic world there was always the recognition of the silent and the unknown as the closest companions of the human journey. . . .

Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: "Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me." Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth. Silence is the sister of the divine.

— John O'Donohue in Anam Cara

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