[written for The Southern Cross, newspaper of the Diocese of Savannah]
I attended a conference on preaching last week and the most valuable lesson I have taken from it is the need for silence. It may seem contradictory, attending a conference on preaching and many presenters speaking on the need for silence. How can this be?
The opening line of the first speaker was a quote from the great Spanish doctor of the Church Saint John of the Cross: “The Father spoke one Word, which was His Son, and this Word always speaks in eternal silence, and in silence it must be heard by the soul.”
Christ speaks to us gently in the silence of our souls, yet our modern world is filled with noisy words, in particular through the new social media – twitter, facebook, blogger etc. Even though our lives are stuffed with more words than we can handle, we oftentimes remain starved for true communication.
These new means of communication are excellent and are being used by many for the glory of God, but we must be sure the sources of the words we read and transmit are rooted in silence. Silence yields words rich in content. Noise yields words rich in nothing.
We live in a noisy world starved for communication. How can it be that while having dinner at a restaurant during my conference, out of seven couples I observed, four of them at a given moment during their meal, both man and woman were glued to their cell phones? With one particular couple, both remained glued to their respective phones after their delicious pasta arrived until the wife began eating and then forced her husband to put down his phone. He did not put it away, but neatly placed it by his plate. Stuffed with words in their cell phones, yet starving in communication with the person sitting next to them.
The wisdom of San Juan de la Cruz is a warning to us. If we surround ourselves only with noisy words, we will not hear the Word spoken by the Father in eternal silence. We must seek and produce words from the depths of silence to have filling communication. Silence yields words rich in content because they have touched the mystery of Christ and have the ability to transmit that experience onto others.
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