Last Updated on April 28, 2008 by FERS Disability Attorney
In the West, and especially in the United States, silence is an uncomfortable state. At a party; at a gathering; with a chance but brief encounter; silence cannot be sustained; it must be expunged, invaded, violated, shattered and engulfed. The concept itself is rarely spoken of in its singular modality; instead, it is often hyphenated and combined: “uncomfortable silence” or “embarrassing-silence”. Thus, the very concept itself has come to be understood as that which is unpleasant or undesirable. It is a void which must be filled; music, conversation, laughter, banter, platitudes, politeness, complimentary dialectics, rhetorical flourishes, conjugated dialogues – each has a place, in its rightful time, in its proper context. But so does silence.
Often, at gatherings, in medium to larger crowds, I find myself silent; listening to others speak; being polite but watchful; I enjoy listening to others. Some find that I am aloof, or sometimes even unfriendly; yet, I find that silence is a state of comfort for me. In the early morning hours, when I pray or meditate, it is important sometimes to listen; the prattle of our thoughts are neither profound nor informative to God; the utter self-contradiction between our stated belief and our actions: If indeed we know God to be omniscient, then do we not also know that He knows our thoughts even before we speak them? Thus, our conversations with God must sometimes take a different road – that of silence, and listening to the quiet voice of God. In the meditative silence of the early morning sunrise, when the robin speaks, the radiance of God pervades with a subtle but persistent explosion of Being – of revealing the being-ness of the world; and our human apparatus to perceive the Being-being-revealed; only in silence can we experience that moment of dawn, when God whispers to us through the revelation of his Being, as the robin knows each day.