A Few Thoughts On Silence
The rather strange letters OCDS after my name below refer (in Latin) to my being a member of the contemplative religious order known as the Order of Carmelites who were reformed in 16th Century Spain by Teresa of Avila, a woman who put a very high value on silence.
Those who know me will confirm that I am generally not short for words - but I do also spend a lot of time in meditative silence - in fact it’s probably why I make so much noise the rest of the time! Vocal praise in its many forms is arguably the public face of our relationship with the divine but I would argue that praise and silence are in fact two sides of the same coin. So, Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel exhorts us when praying to ‘go into your inner room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret’ whilst Paul in Thessalonians sees both sides, calling on us to ‘Rejoice always and pray without ceasing’.
This can be difficult advice for a world getting noisier and busier every day, with technologies that aim to make our life easier, but only at the expense of increasingly demanding our attention. A few years ago, I was invited to speak about inner silence to some theology students. During coffee beforehand we reflected, with a smile, on whether talking about silence was perhaps a contradiction, so I was very touched afterwards when one of the students pressed a book into my hands and extracted a commitment from me that I would read it. The book was The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Belden C. Lane. In this Lane relates the three stages of emptiness he experiences watching his beloved mother’s mental and physical decline at the end of her life, against which is set the silence he finds backpacking in wild mountain landscapes. Alongside these are reflections on the writings of the desert fathers of the Early Church from which we are invited to draw the underlying harmony that he himself found.
I take Belden Lane’s point on the power of landscape. Hillwalkers will confirm that away from all the noise one is somehow effortlessly absorbed into the silence of the landscape. In this sense I conclude that we are very fortunate to live in this part of the world. Inevitably, we all have different things that we notice in everyday life and for me the wooded backdrop to Birnam and Dunkeld when driving north up the A9 somehow pings a bell to remind me of what Paul is calling us to. So, I ask myself, why don’t I get this ping when in a crowded urban environment? Well, from a Carmelite perspective, I imagine that Teresa of Avila would simply say that this is the area where I need to put in a lot more work.
What’s strange is that I have absolutely no idea who the man who gave me the book was, and of course I never saw him again, but then doesn’t grace sometimes just work like that?

Roderick Campbell Guion OCDS
(St Columbas)