Indeed silence does more than tiptoe around the house. Silence moves through all sound like water through netting. The deeper our own interior silence, the more we take on its gracious ways of opening up the tight mind that clenches its teeth around what it wants and spits out what it doesn’t want.
The optimal environment for prayer is physical silence. Saint Augustine, surely one of the most eloquent people in history, thought it was better to keep silent than to speak and that “one should speak only if it is a duty demanded by one’s office.” He continues, “Why do you want to speak and not want to listen? You are always rushing out of doors but are unwilling to return into your own house. Your teacher is within.”‘ Physical silence is good for us and needs to be pursued, cultivated, understood, and revered. Physical silence increases our awareness of all that is going on around us, especially the needs and sensitivities of others. Luis de Leon, O.S.A., the sixteenth-century Spanish Augustinian friar and lyric poet, extols the value of physical silence in his poem “The Quiet Life”: how peaceful is the life, he says,
of him who would all worldly clamour shun
and take the hidden path
whereon have walked alone
those few wise men the world has ever known.
But not too far down the spiritual path we learn that there is a deeper silence that does not require sound waves to be gone.
For the mind that is silent, noise is as direct a spoke into the hub of silence as are birdsong, wind, and waves. It requires nothing more than to meet noise with stillness and not commentary. This is easier said than done and comes after many seasons of practice and much failure. But whether the noise in question is an electric table saw, rush-hour traffic, heavy-footed neighbors in the apartment above us, difficult life circumstances at home or work or, more deafening, the mind-numbing din of the cocktail party in our heads, the way of silence receives with engaged awareness all that is, just as it is, as a large screened-in porch receives whatever breeze that blows. R. S. Thomas prays that silence may work on us “so those closed porches be opened once more … for the better ventilating of the atmosphere of the closed mind.” Silence circulates through the open porches of the mind. But to the mind unventilated by silence, there is only what we like and what we dislike coming at us from all sides, day after day, indeed decade after decade.
Life has a way of being exactly the way it happens to be at any given moment. Life-being-how-it-is (just this) is a wheel of spokes leading into the hub of Silence, irrespective of the presence or absence of pleasant or unpleasant sound. Surely we have our preference as to sound or absence of sound, but Silence resounds in all sound, pleasant or unpleasant. This Silence resounding in all sound ventilates the porches of the mind and makes the ears of attention attend. Discovering the Silence that resounds in all sound, even in noise, places us in what Meister Eckhart calls “the right state of mind,” whether we are in country quiet or market mayhem. This strengthens our practice of contemplation.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
