Fun though it was, playing with three rambunctious brothers and cousins needed a counterbalance. The quiet refuge of a home library beckoned to a little seven-year-old girl. With stillness and golden afternoon sunlight, it was a peaceful enclave for a child with her books, a wonderful gift of “silence and slow time”.
Some 12 years later, my agitated heart was weary of college society and longed for another silent haven, similar to childhood’s library. The Newman Chapel at the University of Kentucky was always open then and usually empty on weeknights. The sanctuary lamp lighted the way to holy silence, and I basked therein, grateful for this well of peace in the midst of a noisy and aimless life.
Soon thereafter, I began instruction in the Catholic faith. A priest friend gave me a book by the late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom entitled, Beginning to Pray. What a unique treasure! So unlike the usual devotional booklets for a neophyte! A certain passage seemed to jump off the pages as I read, all a-tremble: “The day when God is absent, when He is silent—that is the beginning of prayer. Not when we have a lot to say, but when we say to God, ‘I can’t live without You, why are You so cruel, so silent?’ This knowledge that we must find or die—that makes us break through to the place where we are in the Presence.”
Thereafter, I held fast to the interior gift of God’s silence, without which anxiety and fatigue held me in a death-grip. Amidst external hullaballo, mini moments of calm recollection were gifted to me, even when the silent sanctuary and its red lamp was far away. For many years concurrent with the many, constant needs of a large family, I learned to live in interior stillness, even while actively doing some other task.
Finally, in my old age I met the Members of the Society of Christian Doctrine; what a gift! As I began to incorporate the prayers of The Watch, I resonated with the cry to God from St George Preca’s own heart: “I cannot bear to be parted from your goodness!” Here was one who understood the unique gift of silence. Where heart speaks to Heart in the ways of love, blessed silence is equivalent to the very goodness of God.
Saint Teresa of Calcutta affirmed this mysterious gift that is, truly, beyond beyond human understanding: “God speaks in the silence of the heart…and we listen. And then we speak from the fullness of our hearts and God listens. And this listening, this prayer, is Oneness with God…”
After attending Eucharistic Adoration recently, my daughter shared that she envisioned the consecrated Host as a kind of button, uniting the veiled mantle of God with the cloth of humanity. Indeed, at rest in the Monstrance, Jesus reveals His dual nature, united as one within Himself. In 451 AD the Council of Chalcedon discerned that Christ’s two natures were united “without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation”. Although the Hypostatic Union is a profound doctrine, even a child can understand that which fastens together heaven and earth in the holiness of a wafer, just the size of a button!
O Come Let Us Adore Him, the gift of Blessed Silence, Christ our Lord!
Ruth D. Lasseter
SDC Associate
Indiana, USA
