Bill Johnson, one of my dearest friends and a gifted minister, once said to me, “Silence is the language God speaks.” I recall one of the earliest times I heard God speak in just that way.
It was October of 1982. I was barely two months into my ministry as a chaplain at Baptist Hospital East. My pastor invited me to go on a retreat with him in a monastery. After a quick lunch in the hospital cafeteria, we got in his car and headed south.
We arrived at Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery just outside Bardstown. It was my first retreat there, and I planned to stay three days. I was overwhelmed at the silence. While I did not have a full-blown panic attack, I did experience a great deal of anxiety. I wondered how I would manage total silence for seventy-two hours, clueless about exactly what one does on such a retreat. My mind was still at the hospital, engaged in conversations and surrounded by endless noise.
I attended Vespers, a prayer service just before dinner. I felt myself slow down; I breathed more deeply. I attended Compline, the last prayer service of the day and heard the monks sing, “Lord save us, save us while we are awake. Protect us while we are asleep.” The tenderness with which they sang felt as if it were a lullaby they were singing to each other—even as grown men. That phrase, sung in the deep, resonant voices of the monks, touches me every time I go to the monastery.
The next morning, I sat alone in the balcony of the church and wrote of my experience during the prayer services. I still remember writing the sentence that came to portray what I often feel when I am there on retreat. “The silence around me became the quiet within me, the two merging in a mysterious way.”
When I think of peace, my longing for peace, I often go back to that moment. And peace comes—not as an absence of conflict, stress, or struggle. Rather as a Presence, one that is found in the silence. As you wait in this season of Advent, take time to be still. To be silent. Allow the silence around you to lead to a quiet within. The quiet that brings peace.
Prayer: Gracious and loving God, help us to be silent. Come to us bringing the peace of quiet within our hearts and our minds. Amen.
Bob is a retired hospital chaplain and pastoral counselor who does volunteer construction work with Habitat for Humanity. He and his wife of 36 years, Libby, have two grown children, Holly and Eli.