Silence

Religion as storytelling, images, and rituals may simply be the poetry of faith—the allegories, metaphors, verse, meter and rhyme that give relatable witness to our experience of the Divine. This poetry can succeed in giving meaningful, but limited, glimpses of our most sacred understandings even as it fails to adequately replicate the glorious whole, which is unexplainable and mostly unfathomable. The truest revelation of the Unfathomable is silence.

At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monks there are practicing silence among their daily routine of contemplation, work, and prayer. On Gethsemani’s thousands of acres, silence emanates from every sunlit branch and red-haired squirrel, even with the loudness of cars blowing by on the highway that traverses their land. And in the choir of their liturgy, silence penetrates between every word they sing of the Psalms.

Sitting in the rear of the empty church, all white painted brick, stone, golden oak and stained glass of yellow, grey, green, I find the silence endures as a lack that seems like the ultimate richness. There I discover the paradox of silence, what the Buddhists call Emptiness, that it contains everything, that it is rich beyond all comprehension. So that silence is intimate reckoning with the unknowable, unnameable, indescribable All.