Monday, April 13, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The sound of silence
Do not be amazed that I told you,
You must be born from above.
The wind blows where it wills,
and you can hear the sound it makes,
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes;
so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
I remember moments of silence. Living in Madison, Wisconsin during the early 70’s I installed a plywood ceiling four feet from the floor of a small coat closet and covered the space with carpet padding. That was my first prayer closet.
When we worked together with Christian Campus Fellowship, Don Follis took me for a day of retreat to a small monastery in Olivet, south of Danville. We spent several hours in silence. The conversation we had afterward was meaningful and sweet.
What else, Lord?
Walking alone, up and down beanfields when I was a kid. Lying under a wagon half full of corn watching the clouds move slowly through the sky. Silence. Early in the morning, listening to the birds sing. Late at night, reaching up with my imagination to the stars.
I listen to my own thoughts. In time, the voices soften, words shorten, punctuation disappears. I am relaxing from the inside out. Calm waves lap the sand as my mind becomes more still, at peace, available.
Will I hear the voice of God if I don’t seek silence, if I don’t turn off the buzzing electric sounds that mimic life,and tie me to the world, maybe even shut out heaven? In one of my favorite picture books, a young Japanese boy looks everywhere for silence, until at last as he stops looking, it appears. Ma, the silence between the sounds.
I don’t read Spanish, but even in English Juan de la Cruz’ love poem to God warms and then cuts my heart, calling me to a house “all stilled.”
One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
– ah the sheer grace! –
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.
In darkness and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
– ah the sheer grace! –
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.
On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.
This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
– him I knew so well –
there in a place where no one appeared.
Oh guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.
Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.
When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.
I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
The 16th century poet and saint dreams of a soul which lives without words. A New Orleans pastor, Eric Reed, wrote of his own experience.
My den is stilled before my soul is stilled. In this stilling, I go to sleep a little earlier, I read more carefully, I talk more deeply – when I choose to talk.
Mostly, though, I listen.
The evenings are at first very long, but in the growing quiet of the passing weeks, twilight seems as a single moment with a single thought, if any thought.
When I make room and hear the silence, the Word will resound.
(Acts 4, Psalm 2, Colossians 3, John 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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