I am sitting in my living room, enjoying the first white Christmas season of my life. It is a rare feeling of quietness and peace, this double stillness of weather and holiday. I can only imagine that this is what life must have been like in the days before cars, computers, and the rattling noise of phone and television. Yesterday the family was here, noisily celebrating. We watched movies and talked. Today we sit in silence and solitude.
We are missing Sunday Service, to be sure. But even so, I do not really regret it. Can anything better display the beauty of God than the silent whitness of a snowy day? Can anything better convey the sense of reverence than this quiet moment of stillness? No monastery or hermitage can be quieter than this moment.
I think about Elijah, broken from his battle with Ahab, exhausted by his trip through the Sinai desert, praying in is cave and hearing the Still Small Voice of God.
The problem with silence I think, is more in what we do with it. Instead of drinking it in, we are always looking for ways to fill it. Silence does not need to be filled. It needs to fill us. We do not have to break silence, silence needs to break us. God speaks in silence only if we listen to it.
Silence is precious. It is nice to have a piece of it, if only for a little while.
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