By Mark Argent
For some, silence has connotations of austerity. There was someone I offered pastoral care to, as an Elder, who, since the death of her husband, had lived with great loneliness. She was reluctant to make a silent retreat because, spending a painfully large amount of time alone, she was keen to be with people whenever she was able to go away. A few times I gently floated the idea that the aim of a silent retreat as something that helps someone to draw closer to God could have helped in her loneliness, but the time didn’t seem right for that.
The reality is that silence is just a tool to help a person deepen their contemplation and experience of God. At the start of a retreat, I usually say to people that it serves two functions. One is that it is usually easier to tune into God or to encounter God in your own life if you are not also trying to tune into other people. The other reason, which may be more obvious to those giving retreats than those making them, is that each person on an individually-guided retreat follows their own path, taking their own, unique needs into account.
When people are struggling with the silence, there is often something quite profound going on, perhaps around a fear of a deep encounter with God or a fear of what they might face in themselves. That can sometimes feel and sound like shallowness of faith, but, in fact it is usually the exact opposite, expressing an awareness of the richness of the territory people are entering when they decide to embrace silence.
There’s a common perception that introverts take better to silence than extraverts. To an extent that is true, particularly for people having their first experiences of silence. But part of any person’s journey towards an integrated wholeness involves drawing appropriately on their inner resources. Silence can be particularly valuable for the extravert, for whom it is all the more valuable for being less often naturally part of their daily life.
While silence can be a powerful tool, something interesting happens when it is disturbed. People can sometimes feel guilty if they allow interruptions to the silence to affect their prayer experience. However, I met this frequently working at Osterley Retreats, which was directly under a Heathrow flight path, and in sharing contemplative experiences with people who hear voices, interruptions which cannot be avoided, and I have been very much humbled with what these have revealed in terms of prayer and spirituality. It is important to be generous with ourselves, then, when it comes to such infractions.
That is something which leads directly into the contemplative’s experience outside times of retreat. At its best a retreat is not a time when there are certain hours of prayer, separated by ‘time off’, but a time of continual openness, both in and between times of formal prayer. Outside a time of retreat, it’s not normally possible to set aside large slabs of time for silence. A more helpful model is to think of tuning in to the presence of a God who is always there, whether acknowledged or not, using times of silence or stillness to adjust one’s tuning and awareness.
Prayerfully thinking back over the day that has passed, perhaps asking the question Where was God in the experience?’, is a way of deepening this awareness because it helps us to be more in tune with the stillness of deep presence, and of the subtle movements in our spirits which give glimpses of what is going on at the deeper levels in our hearts. For me, the nurturing of those awarenesses is the real purpose of silence in prayer. I find it often more helpful to think in terms of ‘listening’ rather than ‘silence’.
While silence is very helpful, it’s not the whole story, because many of these subtle changes happen in response to the things of daily life. The trick is to use silence as a way of listening. I find myself trying not to limit the contemplative experience to times of silence, instead seeking the generosity to myself and others that enables me to meet God in deep silence in a world that is far from silent.
