SILENT TIME:

The southern windows offer quite another view, strikingly dissimilar. A sweeping and seemingly endless expanse flows into the horizon. Sparsely wooded hillsides and miles of silent, deserted pastureland—wasteland, as it is called here—are its predominant feature. A smattering of corn, planted in small crops, is its only sign of productivity, of human interference. The land lies empty, a vast and empty solitude, scorched by sun and wind blowing down the Missouri River valley in summer, frozen in winter to a silent, white plain. I am in utter, inescapable solitude as I gaze out this window into the Alone this land seems to personify.

There is a city to the north. There is much to be done here. But there is something in the southerly, sweeping solitude that speaks to me—persuades me—of the necessity of undoing, of wasted time and space and of the meaning gleaned by being willing to be so wasted. The unproductive aloneness of this immense nothingness is its value and meaning: the wilderness is the existential expression of the solitary, dependent poverty of human beings, who can find no project or task great enough to distance them from the reality of their need. Without this desert, I will have no place in the city. Without this wasteland, in which I also appear to be wasted, my effort here will be empty and in vain. It is only by offering myself to this wild, empty, silent, and uncertain expanse that I can in truth offer myself to the cacophonous wonder of human affairs. This is my serving solitude, my silent shout of jubilant affirmation.”

"..the language [God] best hears is silent love." (Sayings of Light and Love, # 132)

"The tranquil night
At the time of the rising dawn,
Silent music,
Sounding solitude,
The supper that refreshes, and deepens love."
(The Spiritual Canticle, stanza 15).

God can be present in silence but skits away
I hesitate to write about prayer simply because prayer has been so difficult over the fifty years of my adult life, and also because the topic is so vast and complex even in this single life. To sum up the historical difficulty, after years of the deafening silence of God in meditation I quit praying verbally or silently, sure that God did not speak, and for years kept my peace. Only in attending mass on Sunday did I pray. I sought solace in the company of fellow Catholics. What I did find over those years of silence (I did say the rosary for months at several important times. I am one of those many Catholics who feel safer with Mary than with the elusive Father and the determined Son) is that something about silence is prayer-like, for the silence is essentially attention to nothing else. The something else has to be God, who is just essentially no-thing. This attention is a fore-fronting of what is always present as background – the Being who is present to all beings all the time. God is the horizon of my being. I can pay attention or not, but still God is the horizon. I credit the atheists John Dewey for that insight.

I have for many years, most years in fact, misunderstood prayer and misunderstood what it means for God to speak. A really fine Jesuit spiritual director taught me some things that helped. He kept asking me week after week "what is the Lord saying to you?" And I kept answering after an hour of prayer each day for over a year, "Nothing." The Lord is not saying diddly-squat to me! That's when I stopped, knowing gradually that I just didn't get it, that is, what prayer is and what God has to do with it. When I told the director that I am dense and unpolished in spiritual matters he agreed. I have sympathy with atheists because they seem to have tried to hear and heard nothing, too, and gave up. But I am a Catholic and so stayed in place waiting.

Another problem, brought on by the sort of reflection that has caused me much confusion over the course of my life, is that I know that God is present when I am silent and when I am not, but I don't know HOW I know that! How can you be reasonably certain and not know HOW you are? Is it that God can be present in silence but skits away like a mouse or a cockroach when the light of attention focuses on Him?
William M. Shea, wshea@holycross.edu
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

Thanks, Bill, for sharing this with us. You are sure brave to do so!
I only want to say that with the acceptance of God comes the commitment to the creation and the goodness of it all - people, animals, plants... Everything He made was created to perfection. I have no doubt of his presence and omnipotence. I take everything he gives me: the bad (including the departure of my oldest sister) with the good (there is always nice people in my path), and use this to continue to growth in faith.
Anneris Goris ctresperanza@aol.com
La Esperanza Center, New York

"The Big Silence"
All interested in the topic of silence will be delighted with “The Big Silence,” a series of 12 brief YouTube videos that present you with the experience of five unchurched Londoners who accept the invitation of a Benedictine monk to spend 8 days in silence, broken only by a daily one-on-one conference with a director, who mainly listens to what they discover in their silence. Each of the five agreed to record their thoughts daily by addressing a video camera in the privacy of their rooms and also  allowing their daily conference to be similarly recorded. When the monk meets with each of them a month later, we learn that each can speak of some major change in their lives that derives in some way from what they learned about themselves in the week of accompanied silence. You’ll find it fascinating.

Simply put this in your browser: the big silence youtube (or click here). “The Big Silence” is not to be confused with a well-known documentary of monastic life called “The Great Silence” (also worth seeing on its own terms).
Dennis Hamm, S.J., dhamm@creighton.edu
Creighton Universit

Morning and evening recollections
I've been touched by all of the various meditative offerings–one of the biggest "join-in" efforts of all time it seems.
On Gaudete Sunday I shared with my parish one practice to mine a bit of the silence at the two times a day when it seems to come most naturally: upon waking and upon retiring–to just take a few moments and recall 5 things (of whatever importance) that I am truly grateful for that day, and to ask for the grace to see these things and everything else in my life that day a bit more in the perspective of God's own vision–namely how the Lord is helping me to "see" this situation and myself better.

Blessings on everyone's Christmas Season!
James T. Bretzke, S.J., james.bretzke@bc.edu
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

Silent Time: a life history
When I was younger, I was involved with a Catholic diocesan youth ministry team that ran confirmation retreats on weekends, located at a beautiful, rural retreat center deep in the New England pines. The leader, a fun and wildly-progressive priest, often had us give short spiritual presentations, and I was soon assigned to speak on Praying with Scripture. I did not know much about either scripture or prayer at that time, so, with a month to prepare, I just began ruminating in a meditative way over the daily readings from Mass. This gradually began my personal love of scripture meditation and silent time.  
 
I've been doing this practice – nearly every day – for over three decades now. Initially, I had no idea that what I was essentially practicing was known in church circles broadly as Lectio Divina. Historically and biographically, I did my daily practice late at night for years. After getting married, I soon found myself gravitating toward early mornings. In early mid-career, when my department was downsized and I went for several months without full-time employment, I even began doing my practice in a local (quiet) coffee shop – just to get myself out of the house every morning. I would typically sit at a corner table by the windows, sipping a latte and meditating; some days I would sit outside on the terrace overlooking a bubbling brook. In a large city, you have to find Nature anywhere you can. Small respites of near-silence became vital – at least for me. 
 
Over time, I began to realize that I maintained this practice best in spaces of silence. I began to quietly cultivate silent time. Whether outside in Nature, or having cloistered myself in the back of some darkened monastic chapel, or having learned to sit Zen-like by a large bay window in my apartment, Silence has allowed the inner distractions – the questions, the pressures and the daily tensions of life – to recede into nothingness and engender moments of mindfulness and contemplative awareness.
 
And then I began teaching in a Catholic seminary. 
I suppose it was my own naïveté to think that young seminarians were "into" the practice of silent time. Truth be told, I often found that it could be the furthest thing from their minds. Perhaps this is an indictment of the typical program of seminary busy-ness, where prayer and silence often take a back seat to other pressures. I mean no disrespect when I say this, but as the faculty member in charge of the formation program, I found it ironic that I - as a non-ordained layman – often found myself in cyclical discussions about cultivating "silent time" with so many of our diocesan priest-faculty members. Many quipped that silent time was “for those in religious vows” – which is still, unfortunately,  a view that is shockingly and disappointingly prevalent in some corners in the world of seminary life.
Our Rector soon asked me to teach "Judeo-Christian Spiritual Traditions" to every young man who came through our doors of discernment. To prepare, I began an in-depth study of prayer and silence, which, frankly, had not been required during my own graduate training as a systematic theologian. I took on his challenge, simply because none of our priest-faculty members seemed all that interested in teaching or promoting the topics of prayer and silence. Was their hesitation unique? Perhaps, and perhaps not. I gradually began meeting colleagues at other seminaries across the nation who observed similar attitudes of shyness or hesitation in many diocesan priest-colleagues on their seminary faculties, as well.
 
Once in a while, I would meet an undergraduate seminarian who had already developed a significant prayer life and practice of silent time prior to entering seminary. They would often balk at the manner in which our liturgists sped through the communal liturgy of the hours in robotic-like monotone. "Why is there no time for silence?" they would ask. In response, the liturgists would often tell them, "You don't understand the life of a parish priest... silence is not your vocation!" I gradually began to perceive what appeared to be a correlation between the high rates of seminary attrition and institutions that, unfortunately, simply gave lip service to silence.
 
Oddly enough, when I look back on some of the most prayerful young men I taught and worked with over those eleven years – I have learned that very many of them (perhaps even a large majority of them) are now happily married with children, and highly active in their local parishes. My own local parish council, for instance, happens to include five middle-aged males who – in their earlier days – had each spent time discerning a priestly vocation from within various US seminaries. Ask around. There seems to be a whole lot of ex-seminarians serving on parish councils across the United States.

A further observation.
Remember when the Vatican had an official "visitation" of all US Seminaries, following the scandals in the Archdiocese of Boston?
Our particular seminary happened to weather the investigation process very well. The bishop who led the team that descended on our small corner of the seminary world, pulled me aside toward the end of the visitation process and asked to meet with me privately and off the record. He then told me of his personal struggle – as a bishop – to effectively encourage his own diocesan presbyterate toward prayer and silence. "They are very good administrators and pastors and social workers – but they simply do not make any time for silence in their lives," he confided. “So many tell me that prayer and silence are not that important or that they just do not make any time for it!”
 
He is a fairly well-known moderate bishop, well liked by the people in his diocese and elsewhere. He had very good working relationships with the (mostly lay) theologians working at the various Catholic universities, colleges and pastoral ministry institutes located within his large diocese. He also struck me as someone who actually seemed like a man of deep prayer.  "If there is no silent time, there is probably no personal prayer life," he suggested. "And if there is no prayer, we are simply actors on a stage!" 
 
What he told me that day was stunning. Perhaps it also bears on our own vocations as theologians. 
Something for all of us to ponder. 
Eric W. Hendry, ehendry@hotmail.com
University of Dallas, Irving, TX.