Still Knowing: Meeting God in Silence

Last updated on: February 22, 2011 at 4:40 pm by Billy Kangas

Still Knowing: Meeting God in Silence 2011-02-22T16:40:00-04:00 Billy Kangas

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Last Friday I went to a solitude retreat just outside of Chicago. From 9am to 9pm I prayed in silence. This was a new experience for me, and a challenge. I have difficulty with silence, although I know I need it sometimes, I chafe under it. I have a tendency to “go” all the time. I feel if I’m not muli-tasking I’m wasting my life. When I do cook I have books being read to me on my kindle, when I drive I listen to lectures, when I do the laundry I’m streaming Podcasts. I try to learn every waking moment of my day. This makes it difficult for me to take time to be in silence.

In this information age silence is a void to be filled with facts.

This view flies in the face of the biblical view of silence. In the Bible silence is a space in which God pours forth revelations of God’s own self. God speaks into silence in Genesis 1 and it is filled with a universe that declares God’s glory. God speaks to the prophet Elijah, not through earthquake or wind, but in a still small voice (1 Kings 19). The Psalmists tells us that God’s help comes to his silent soul (Ps 94), and that and that we can find a knowledge (not just facts) of God in the silence (Ps 46).

Most of the time in my own life God tends to be a polite companion. If I fill my life with noise he does not enter the conversation forcefully, but simply waits until there is a break to speak. I have found that in taking times of silence I find God much more readily, and powerfully. In fact there is a certain power that silence has on me that noise does not, as William Dean Howells once said, “He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.”

The retreat last Friday was a time that I was able to give God the time to speak into my life. The highlight of my time was when I was able to walk through a labyrinth and just take time to listen to God. Although I try to take time in my daily prayer to listen to God, I can’t remember the last time I was able to take so much time just to listen. The first few hours of my solitude retreat I went through a lot of Psalms and prayers, but eventually I just ran out of things to say and was able to listen much more fully.

I was overwhelmed with how much more I could sustain continual prayer when I moved away from filling the silence myself to letting God be in charge with filling the silence. God didn’t strive to fill the space with words but filled my time with an awareness of Love that was present in both phrases and punctuation.

Another thing that stuck out to me was how after a while I found myself praying the parts of the liturgy and Common Psalms and prayers without realizing it. Once I got past worrying what I was supposed to pray prayers began to bubble up right out of me.

I’d love to hear if anyone else has ever experienced the same sorts of things.

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