“Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again, Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping, And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains Within the sound of silence.”
This might be the introduction of the song, The Sound of Silence, but picture the image being painted by the words. You are sitting alone in a room, completely alone. Not a soul is in the room to speak to you yet a thought starts to creep into your mind. This thought is a voice of a thought that is not your own. But the only time you can hear this faint voice whispered is in the sound of silence.
One of the most obvious ways to grow closer to God is through prayer. But many people do not actually know how to pray. According to the Catholic Catechism, prayer is "lifting up our hearts and minds to God." But what does that mean? What does it look, feel, and sound like?
My personal prayer life started by doing the exact opposite of what prayer is supposed to look like (so don’t follow my example). I made a deal with God. I told God if He gave me a friend, then I would pray the rosary every day. This deal was inspired by the Bible verse Matthew 6:6 that says “But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. “
So I did exactly that. Each day, I would go to my room, lock the door, turn off all sounds and distractions and started to pray the rosary in hopes that God would magically bring me a friend. Without know it, during that time I was creating a moment of silence that welcomed God to speak to me. Of course, God in heaven just laughed at me and said “that’s not how this works…” But humorously enough, God did answer my prayer and used these silent moments to speak to me in a way I’ve never experienced before. Not in the way I expected, but in a way greater yet calmer than I could have ever imagined.
Each day, I unenthusiastically prayed my rosary. Slowly, that changed into contently praying the rosary. Finally, it became an eagerly awaited part of my day because it was my God and me time. That was when I realized that my prayer had been answered and in fact I had crazily enough made a friend through my deal with God. I had found a friend that I could talk to every day and He would always be there to listen. As cliché as it may sound, that’s when I met my new best friend for life, Jesus.
As my friendship with God grew, I started to understand that prayer does not just need to be formal prayers, like the beautiful prayer of the rosary, but could also be just informal chatter like talking to anyone else. I started to tell God everything about my day. This is when I realized that those fancy words from the catechism of lifting your heart and minds to God just means being present with God in a conversation. But there was still one thing missing from my prayer to make it a true conversation. A conversation requires two people communicating back and forth, but I was doing all the talking.
This is the part of prayer that causes a lot of people to stop praying. They pray hard for something but then God never answers them. Why does God never talk back to me in prayer? The real question is do you ever give Him the chance?
I am one of the quietest people you will ever meet. Most people when they meet me introduce themselves and I say my name. They start talking. I don’t respond and just awkwardly smile. They pause a brief second…then things get awkward so they start talking again, and out of fear of an awkward pause they keep talking until they run out of things to say and then quickly leave the scene leaving me only a split second to have ever made a comment back.
This is exactly what we do in our prayer lives. We talk to God, pause three seconds, hear no miraculous voice from the heavens so we start praying again out of fear of having to sit in silence for more than three seconds. Think about it, when is the last time you sat in a room by yourself, no music, no games, no phones, no internet, not even a journal to write your thoughts? Just sat for several minutes in complete silence? Is silence our old friend? Or is it our fear? If God is coming to talk with us once again are we being silent enough to give Him the chance to say what He wants to tell us?
God might not speak to us in the crazy ways we picture with lightning coming out of the clouds, but He does speak in the whispering voice of the silence. We see this is even true when we read 1 Kings 19:11-13 when Elijah only hears God through the silent whisper:
“There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD but the LORD was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake but the LORD was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire but the LORD was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak.”
How true is that verse to our own searching for God's voice! How often do we search for God in the chaos of our lives as if God is only present in the big earthquakes or fires around us. But that is not where God pursues us. No, He pursues us through the silence. How often do we give God a chance to speak to us in that silence? How often do we listen and seek God by us taking the initiative to create a calm silent moment in our lives and leave the chaos of the world behind?
So what does this "light silent sound" look, feel, and sound like in our own prayer life with God? His voice might be a thought or gut feeling that suddenly appears and will not disappear. It might be a certain Bible verse jumping out at you when reading the Holy Scriptures. It might be a friend or even a stranger coming up to you and saying specific words you needed to hear. No matter how God speaks to you, He is speaking. You just need to be quiet enough to hear Him from within the sound of silence.
When the world surrounds you with chaos, it can be easy to forget to take time to go to the inner room and create that silence for God to speak to our hearts. Take a moment to reflect on how you can improve your prayer life and create those moments of silence within your daily schedule while meditating on these words from Mother Teresa:
“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
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