Listening for God in the Silence: A Benedictine Meditation

Today's reading in the Rule, Silence after Compline, offers us a unique opportunity to look closely at the noise in our lives.

Noise is not merely a condition of the modern world; many of us recognize it as a spiritual ailment. We tend to think of noise as an external reality — the music that never quite stops, the slammed door down the hall, the ceaseless chatter, a grating voice that scrapes against the surface of our mind. Yet Benedict understood something far deeper: noise is not only measured in decibels. It is measured in its power to agitate and harden the heart.

When noise becomes habitual, when it fills day after day and month after month, something thickens inside us. The walls of the mind grow dense and impenetrable. The soul becomes hard of hearing. What we lose is not simply quiet; we lose access to the inner voice — that gentle, steady voice within us that reveals our pain, clarifies our truth, and whispers of the presence of God.

The Loss of Inner Hearing

The Fathers and Mothers of the desert warned that a noisy life becomes a scattered life. Scattered people cannot discern. The soul that never rests cannot see. What is drowned out by the noise is not merely our thoughts but our capacity for interior truth.

We can become so conditioned to the outer roar that we no longer feel the subtle movements of God within us. The agitation becomes normal. The distraction becomes comfortable. The inner ear stiffens, and what once could be heard — the stirrings of conscience, the gentle nudges of grace, the invitations to wisdom — fades into a distant hum.

To listen for God requires more than a quiet room; it requires the cultivation of silence within.

Why Silence Alone Is Not Enough

We often imagine that silence is the solution. We seek a quiet retreat, a calm morning, a few minutes of stillness before the day begins. These are good and necessary. But Benedict points us further: silence is not an end in itself.

Silence can be empty. Silence can be merely the absence of noise rather than the fullness of presence. Silence, if unguided, can even lead us deeper into our own anxieties.

So Benedict does something profoundly pastoral: he shapes the night.

He instructs that the day should end not with the ferocity of Scripture’s battles nor with the clang of human struggle, but with the gentle Word of God — passages chosen intentionally to soothe rather than provoke. He wants the heart to be laid down in peace, not agitation.

For Benedict, silence must be inhabited. It must be filled with the softening presence of God. Only then does it become the kind of silence in which the soul can rest and hear.

The Night as Teacher

Most spiritual traditions underestimate the night. Benedict does not. He knows that what we absorb before sleep lingers long after consciousness drifts away. A soul unsettled at bedtime wakes in fragments.

Benedict offers a simple discipline: end the day in the presence of the gentle Word. Do not feed the mind on stories of violence or contention. Allow Scripture to become balm. Let the night itself become a monastery of quietness. In this way, silence becomes not merely absence, but nourishment.

Learning to Listen for God

Listening for God is not passive. It is an act of consent:

I grant God access to the inner room of my life,

I loosen the walls that noise has built,

I place myself in the condition where grace can be heard.

This listening grows slowly. It begins with moments, then becomes a posture, and finally a disposition of the heart.

We listen for God when:

we choose to pause instead of react,

we choose gentleness instead of agitation,

we end the day with something holy upon our lips,

we allow the night to teach what the day has obscured,

we cultivate an inner stillness that remains even when

      the world clamors.

In such silence, God speaks not in thunder but in truth. Not in spectacle but in subtlety. Not in the noise of our striving but in the openness created by our surrender.

The Gift of Being Quieted

Ultimately, Benedictine silence is not something we achieve; it is something God offers. It is a healing, a softening, a gentle clearing of the inner space where grace prefers to dwell.

When we listen in silence, we hear not only God but also ourselves — our wounds, our longings, our hopes, our fears — held in a Presence that neither condemns nor abandons us. The silence becomes communion.

And then something unexpected occurs:

unwilled change begins, and

grace reshapes the soul. Peace returns. The heart loosens.

The truths of life rise quietly to the surface.

 

In listening for God in the silence, 
we discover that God has been listening to us all along.

Face Reality...

Sister Joan shared with us today a short wisdom from Anthony de Mello, "Change that is real is change that is not willed.  Face reality and unwilled change will happen."

I invite you to reread Sr. Joan's commentary on the rule for November 18th. It contains a great many seemingly simple but extraordinarily important thoughts into who we are and how we might go about becoming who we want to be.

Growth is not an accident. Growth is a process. We have to want to grow. We have to will to move away the stones that entomb us in ourselves. We have to work at uprooting the weeds that are smothering good growth in ourselves.

For a much close look at the call to face reality, please click here.  It's rather lengthy but I believe will offer you a rich glimpse into the wisdom of becoming.

Should you choose to click and read the added commentary let me offer this little insight.  After you click and see the document, click on the little box brackets at the bottom right, just to the left of the little envelop.  This will enlarge the screen image and make reading easier.

The call to exude...

In today's commentary, Chapter 38 of the Rule, Sister Joan invites us to exude the Scriptures.  Benedict understood that the human heart moves slowly.  Sister Joan understands he was not urging monks to imitate Scripture by sheer will.  She knows that Benedict was counseling patience:

• stay with the text long enough until the text stays with you,
• keep company with Scripture until Scripture keeps company with your soul.

And then--without pressure, without display, without self-conscious piety--your very life will exude what you have absorbed.

A contemporary Benedictine might rephrase this saying--like the pine forest:

Do not try to act biblical.  Become so soaked in the Word
that your very life gives off its fragrance.

 

Life lessons....

 

Sr. Joan speaks to exceptions as a way life.  I believe she is inviting us to consider a broader lesson in today's reading.

Life--living--is complex.  We must be attentive to the demand's on and the capacity of each of those for whom we have responsibility.  We must adjust at all time the demands placed on those for whom we care.  We must be careful to insure to provide them with all they need to be sustained and to continue to grow in faith and service appropriate to their stage of life and condition.

This is integral to our spiritual journey as we care for each other.

To make it possible....

Quoting the rabbis, Sr. Joan reminds us today of the gift of age....

The purpose of maintaining the body in good health is to make it possible for you to acquire wisdom.  

Benedictine spirituality reminds us that coming to the fullness of life we have the opportunity of continue to grow not only in age but in wisdom.

 Every day we have gives us another chance to become the real persons we are meant to be.

And, in so becoming, to not only care for ourselves but to carryout the Gospel message and care for our neighbors.

If you have time, let me invite you to visit Wisdom

We are called....

We are called to recognize daily the role of the transcendent and the transforming--we need both--ora et labora. Sr. Joan states this most clearly when she reminds us...

Prayer is not for its own sake and the world of manual labor is not a lesser world than chapel.

We need them both and the world of manual labor is to be recognized and honored as integral to life and living.  Benedict reminds us that we must never forget that humble work is as sacred and sanctifying as prayer.

 

 

Distribute as each had need....

This morning, November 11, Benedict reminded us that distribution is to be made as each has need.   (Acts 4:35)

These too are His children....

It's time!

Benedictine Spirituality

Benedictine spirituality--a journey to the wholeness
that answers the emptiness in each of us. 

Sr Joan Chittister

Take a moment and read Sr. Joan's commentary for today.  If today is not November 9th, you will see another reading.  But that's okay.  Sr. Joan's commentary will breath a 21st century life into the sacred writings of St. Benedict.

I encourage you to begin reading Sr. Joan's commentary every morning as you arise to start a new day.  Month by month, she will open your eyes to the wisdom of a 6th century Saint and rich wisdom of a contemporary monastic--Sister Joan Chittister.  You will be richer for your reading.

Read meditatively.  Begin by slowing your thoughts; bring a stillness to your mind. This stillness is not empty--it is full of presence--like the silence between the notes in sacred music.  In that silence, your soul recognizes itself not as a separate flame but as part of the great fire.

Humility

The Back Story

 

As we grow older, the more we realize there are frequently back stories worth hearing. worth remembering.  The story of Robert Frost is a beautiful and poignant example.

The man who wrote about peaceful snowy woods buried four of his children. Robert Frost is the poet America fell in love with—the grandfather of American verse, the voice of quiet reflection, the man who wrote about roads diverging in yellow woods. We imagined him serene. Wise. At peace with nature. We were completely wrong.

Robert Frost didn't find peace in those woods. He was searching for it—desperately—through a life that tried to break him at every turn. His father drank and died when Robert was eleven, leaving the family penniless. His mother turned to séances, trying to speak to the dead. Young Robert grew up anxious, brilliant, and haunted—reading by candlelight, questioning everything, trusting nothing. By twenty, he'd already lost his first child—baby Elliott, just three years old. That was only the beginning.

Frost tried to be anything but a poet. He worked farms, taught school, edited newspapers—failing at all of it. By 38, he was broke, frustrated, and drowning. In a last desperate gamble, he sold the family farm and moved his wife Elinor and their children to England.

In a small rented cottage outside London, something cracked open. He wrote. And wrote. And wrote. "The Road Not Taken." "Mending Wall." "After Apple-Picking." The poems that would make him immortal poured out—not from contentment, but from survival. They sounded pastoral. Gentle. But beneath the surface? Razor wire. Loneliness. The brutal weight of choice. The knowledge that every path taken means another abandoned forever.

"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom," Frost once said. His began in grief and ended in endurance. The tragedies kept coming. Daughter Marjorie died from complications after childbirth. Son Carol, depressed and struggling, took his own life. Daughter Irma descended into mental illness. His beloved wife Elinor, worn down by loss after loss, grew distant and died too soon.

Frost carried it all. Every funeral. Every unanswered question. Every moment of wondering if he could have saved them. And he transformed that unbearable weight into art. That's why his woods feel so real. They weren't decoration. They were sanctuary. A place to think when thinking hurt. A place to walk when standing still meant drowning. He didn't write about nature's beauty—he wrote about what you do when beauty isn't enough to save you. How you keep walking. How you mend walls even when you don't believe in them. How you stop by woods on a snowy evening and choose—despite everything—to keep going. "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." That wasn't poetry. That was survival.

January 20, 1961. Robert Frost stood on a platform at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. He was 86 years old. Frail. Nearly blind from the cold wind and brutal sun glare. He'd written a special poem for the moment—"Dedication"—but when he tried to read it, the light was too bright. The paper shook in his trembling hands. He couldn't see a single word. For a moment, it looked like failure. Embarrassment on the national stage.

But then Robert Frost—the man who'd survived when survival seemed impossible—lifted his head and recited from memory. Not the new poem. The one he knew by heart. "The Gift Outright." His voice rang out strong, clear, defiant. And in that moment, the poet who spent his life walking through grief stood tall—not despite his scars, but because of them.

Robert Frost wasn't the gentle grandfather of American poetry. He was a warrior who turned wounds into words. He didn't write to escape suffering—he wrote to walk straight through it, and invite us to follow. His roads diverged not in peaceful forests, but in the valley of the shadow of death. And he chose—again and again—to keep walking. Not because it was easy. But because stopping wasn't an option. And maybe that's the real gift he left us: Not the promise that life will be beautiful—but the proof that even when it's unbearable, we can still create something worth leaving behind.  

From the Old Photo Club