It is a curious thing, is it not, how silence unnerves us? We fill it with weather updates, trivia, and well-meaning noise. A lift journey, a park bench, a few seconds on the telephone line, we rush to fill the void, as if silence were some sort of failing. Yet I have come to believe that silence is not emptiness at all. It is a kind of presence, one that speaks not with words but with a kind of settled knowing.
Silence is a teacher insistent and firm. It bids us slow down, listen differently. Not simply to what is said, but to what is unsaid, to the longings under our speech, the ache between the lines. In silence, we begin to discern not just what we think, but who we are becoming.
Of course, there are many kinds of silence. There is the awkward silence that hovers when a truth is too tender to name. There is the reverent silence at a graveside, and the sacred hush in a chapel at twilight. And there is the violent silence, the kind enforced by fear, exclusion, or erasure. We must be honest about that. Not all silences are holy.
Yet in our current moment, I worry less about enforced silence and more about forgotten silence. The silence we’ve lost because we are always switched on, screened, streamed, notified into oblivion. We’ve become allergic to stillness, convinced that if something is not happening, we are not alive.
But life grows in silence. Seeds sprout underground. Friendships deepen in the quiet spaces between words. Faith matures not in thunder, but in still, small voices.
Perhaps the invitation is not merely to seek silence, but to honour it when it arrives. To build pockets of quiet into our days, not as escape, but as sanctuary. Five minutes by a window. A breath before replying. A walk without earbuds. These are not idle luxuries; they are spiritual practices.
And if you are blessed to share silence with another, truly share it, hold that space gently. Not every gap needs to be filled. Some silences are full to the brim with grace.
Let us then, in this age of unrelenting volume, choose at times to be quiet. Not to disappear, but to be fully present. Not to withdraw, but to deepen.
Silence, I suspect, may be one of the last honest places left.
Shall we go there together?
