Faith | Silence opens our heart and makes room for love

“The silence may have saved our marriage” and the tears in the eyes of the speaker gave authenticity to his story.

Following the Biblical instruction, “Be still and know that I am God,” my annual silent retreat was designed to bring us closer to God in our individual lives.

And the silence helped us know ourselves better, when we stopped telling our stories about who we think we are. It surprised me that it also drew us closer to each other as we shared silence.

In a world of unlimited distractions, voluntary silence in a beautiful rural setting, with like-minded companions, wise teachers and good food, is a powerful experience. We received instructions in spiritual practices we then did in silence, sometimes sitting together in a circle, sometimes on our own outside in the gardens and woods.

We ate in silence, although the vegetarian food often generated a lot of crunching. We did chores together around the retreat center, washing windows, raking leaves, harvesting blackberries, meal set up and clean up. Lots of laughter, but no talking.

The silence challenged us to cherish our own perceptions of beauty and wonder.

When a sunset was spectacular, we didn’t persuade other people to see what we were seeing, feel what we were feeling.

If deer were grazing in the meadow, our rapt attention could draw others to the gentle sight of the does and fawns, but we didn’t announce it or recruit fellow watchers. It can be odd not to go get someone else to validate your experience.

Many of us had been attending the retreat for years, and were long-time friends. If we had been talking, it would have been easy to exclude newcomers from our conversations, as we remembered events from previous retreats, or talked about people not there. The silence erased that opportunity for being exclusive, and allowed us to be very present to everyone.

Staying in the moment of each meal, gesturing when we wanted the salt or the pitcher of water, laughing together when the cooked pears turned out to be hard as rocks, we forged a bond of togetherness—even love, that could only have happened in the silence.

The silence that brought us into the nearer presence of God showed us that drawing closer to God also includes drawing closer to each other. For God comes to us in many ways, especially in the ordinary, flawed and wonderful people we encounter daily.

Much of our talking with God is an exercise in self-justification, and even an attempt at control, asking God to fix certain things, including ourselves, and make life work in the way we want it to.

We practiced being silent in the presence of God, with no pleas, praises, confessions, excuses or lamentations. Just the spaciousness of silence that opens the heart.

In silence, setting aside the stories of who we are that come from the ego rather than the heart, giving up sparring about who’s right and who’s wrong, allows a simple powerful connection of love.

This is our natural relationship with God. Turns out it’s natural for our relationships with friends and strangers too.

At the end of the retreat we shared our experiences, and that’s when the husband spoke up about how the silence had begun to heal his marriage. He and his wife had signed up for dish washing duty. “We worked side by side and neither of us could tell the other how to do it better.”