During the Night, while enduring God’s torturous absence, we come to realize, perhaps in a moment of calm, a moment of peace, a moment when the mind finds ease and separates itself from the anxieties of the world, that there is, swallowing the darkness already endured, a terrifying silence. Him who loves you is silent. Where is God’s voice? Who do your prayers ascend to? One begins to feel that the Host is no more than bread, or the crucifix is no more than bronze on wood. The sacred begins to devolve, the mystical dimension of the world becomes flat, empty, cold, and senseless. What comes with this silence is occasionally a spiritual atheism. Spiritual in the sense that it’s not intellectual. God exists, but His voice seems non-existent, his love seems to have faded. The silence is all that’s left–nothing but the echoes of our own pleads, the cries in the dark that nobody hears.

However, this silence shouldn’t be seen as abandonment, as God casting His child aside. Rather, this silence is the love of God, his yearning to bring us closer to Him. Lovers don’t shout to each other, they whisper softly to each other. A man whispers to his beloved and she, in turn, draws closer to him, her ear to his mouth:”I love you,” he says. And perhaps it’s the same with God. Perhaps he is our lover and we are his beloved. Perhaps in the silence he’s really saying to us, “Draw closer. Come to me. Be with me.” Yet, the only way to hear the gentle whispers of a lover is to be silent ourselves, to make dead the world so His words might live. Mother Teresa gives us five silences so that we may hear God: silence of the eyes, silence of the ears, silence of the mouth, silence of the mind, and silence of the heart. We are to only seek the beauty and goodness of God and close our eyes to others’ faults; we are to listen to God and the cry of the needy, closing our ears to the whispers of gossip and temptation; we are to praise God alone and refrain from lying, from using speech to harm; we are to open our minds to the truth of God, to the truth of Christ, and to avoid rash judgement and falsehood; we are to love God alone and avoid selfishness, jealousy, and envy.

It is by listening to God alone, by making God the center of our attention, that the world around us fades, that the veil of anguish, anxiety, and misery drops, revealing all our toils to be a facade covering up Him, a loving God. To hear God in the “silence” we must ourselves be silent. No man has known God more through silence than Christ himself. In the face of His Passion he remained silent. Before the council he “kept silent and did not answer” (Mk 14:61). And when Herod asked many questions of Jesus he “gave him no answers” (Lk 23:9). Additionally, Christ’s silence in the face of Pilate caused Pilate to be “amazed” (Mk 15:5). Christ, one with the will of God, realizing His cup to drink, His cross to bear, became silent, so that, through the agony, he could hear His Father. And no greater place can we see Christ’s silence than in Adoration where Christ himself sits there soundless and we, likewise, sit there silent, without word, seeing God as God, Christ as flesh, Lord as lover. Let us be, as Pilate was, “Amazed.” Let us be silent. Let us hear God.

In silence and quiet the devout soul advances in virtue and learns the hidden truths of Scripture. There she finds a flood of tears with which to bathe and cleanse herself nightly, that she may become the more intimate with her Creator the farther she withdraws from all the tumult of the world.

– Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book I Chapter XX