Into Silence
Beyond Prayers of Petition
Much of what draws us to prayer is some need. Yes, we are called to prayer to offer gratitude for our many blessings and to worship His Godhead. However, many of my daily prayers are spontaneous prayers of petition. Believing there has arisen a threat to my or a loved one’s well-being, I ask God to correct the matter, thus alleviating some physical or emotional suffering.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are in a boat “crossing to the other side.” The wind becomes boisterous, the waves beat onto the boat, and water begins to fill it. In distress, fearing for their lives, the disciples call out to Jesus, asleep on a cushion.
I can imagine the disciples’ incredulity, faces twisted against Jesus’ unawareness of their plight. I suspect it was ultimately the impetuous Peter who finally woke him.
Once awake, what would they have expected Jesus to do? It is natural when we worry that we want someone to worry with us, as if worry alone could be strong enough to save us. But worry was not going to keep the boat from sinking.
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The chronology of Mark’s gospel reports that, before the storm, the disciples had seen the exorcism of a demonic, the restoration of Simon’s ill mother-in-law, and the healing of a paralytic. But a physical healing was not going to silence this storm. In the heat of the moment, and based on their early experience with Jesus, I suspect the best the disciples wished for was that he would grab a bucket and help them bail water.
But Jesus needs his young followers, to whom he will entrust his Church, to spiritually “cross to the other side” with him. They likely had begun to understand the mystery of a miracle. Still, he had to get them to cross over between having faith and instilling the virtue of hope more deeply, that in the face of a certain disaster, there was still reason to expect something good. To that point, they would have had no reference to anticipate Jesus’ response, that in a straightforward three-word rebuke, “Peace. Be calm,” serenity would be restored, and the storm abated. Their awe is palpable, deeply stunned into awareness. Yet, as importantly, I can imagine a prolonged time of stillness and silence that followed.
It has been opined that we lack imagination regarding God, and Fr. Julián Carrón, in his book Disarming Beauty, says that the masses have lost their sense of mystery. We need a spiritually vibrant imagination and a deep sense of mystery, or God’s omnipotence and omnipresence are drowned in the mundane aspects of life.
How do we regain this imagination and mystery? Jesus indicates in his rebuke of the Pharisees and his parable refusing to send a messenger from the dead to Lazarus’ brothers that experiencing miracles will not be enough to sway the hardened heart. We must “cross to the other side” with him. Starting simply, we need to learn to embrace silence.
In Robert Cardinal Sarah’s masterpiece The Power of Silence, he notes that “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost.”
And silence restores mystery. Again, Cardinal Sarah writes, “There is a real warning that our civilization needs to hear. If our intellects can no longer close their eyes, if we no longer know how to be quiet, then we will be deprived of mystery, of its light, which is beyond darkness, of its beauty, which is beyond all beauty. Without mystery, we are reduced to the banality of earthly things.”
French philosopher Blaise Pascal notes, “The root of man’s problem is that he does not know how to sit quietly alone in his room.”
It takes practice to be alone in silence, but those wiser than I confirm it is a practice worthy of the effort.
