There is a silence that is empty, and there is a silence that is full. The first is absence. The second is presence. I have lived long enough with both to know the difference.
When I speak of silence, I do not mean the absence of noise. I mean a condition of the soul. A posture. A discipline. In the world that formed me, silence was the beginning of all wisdom. We did not speak until we had listened. We did not move until we had become still.
In the monastery, silence is not a burden. It is not repression. It is permission. It is the permission to dwell more deeply in the mystery. To wait before rushing in. To see before explaining. To be before doing. And that, in our time, is a form of testimony.
The Church today has many words. It has words for every crisis, every trend, every question. Yet I often wonder whether our abundance of speech masks an absence of faith. We do not let the mystery rest. We do not let it weigh on us. We do not trust it to speak without our commentary.
But silence is not evasion. It is not refusal. It is the deepest form of engagement. To keep silence in the presence of the holy is not to withdraw from it, but to fall inward toward it. Words name things. Silence allows them to be known.
I do not claim that silence solves our problems. It does not fix anything. But it keeps us from pretending we are the solution. It protects the soul from false certainties. It prepares the heart to receive what cannot be grasped by assertion alone.
My silence is not protest. Nor is it strategy. It is witness. A testimony to the God who does not need our slogans, our innovations, or our control. A testimony to the reality that holiness does not begin with understanding. It begins with fear. And then love.
Those who are formed by silence carry something different. They speak less, and what they say is slower. Their words do not press. They open. Their presence does not entertain. It steadies. This is not a skill. It is a fruit. It is what grows in the heart when noise is no longer allowed to feed it.
We do not need louder voices. We need deeper roots. And the root of all true speech is silence. Not silence as a technique, but silence as a way of being. A habit of humility. A manner of trust. A readiness to receive.
If you find silence difficult, do not be ashamed. The soul resists it because it is where the truth begins to surface. And the truth, when it first arrives, is always uncomfortable. But if you remain there long enough, you may find that it no longer frightens you. You may even find that it speaks.