2011-10-15 11:40:17

Lombardi: Silence is essential for hearing the Word of God


EDITORIAL
Octava Dies 641, October 15, 2011
By Federico Lombardi
Director, Vatican Television Centre & Vatican Radio
Wondrous silence
On 29 September the theme of reflection for the next World Day of Social Communications was announced: “Silence and Word: path of evangelisation”. Just a few days later, on Sunday 9 October, the Pope went to the Carthusian monastery of Serra San Bruno, in Calabria, to pray with the monks in one of the most distinctive places of the Church’s spirituality—a place where, as the Prior said, for centuries “the lamp of prayer has been kept lit in silence and obscurity”.
There is no antithesis between silence and word, between prayer and proclamation. For silence is the essential prerequisite for accepting and preparing to hear the Word; the sound of the Word becomes meaningful precisely because it is interspersed with moments of silence.
For the person of today, immersed in a torrent of constant noise—physical or mental—the life of monks inspires admiration and awe, a nostalgic yearning for the rhythm and balance of a way of life lost in the past. In any case almost everyone feels its charm and understands—at least vaguely—the vital importance of a place where silence is not the equivalent of a void of nothingness, but rather the breath of the spirit, where it becomes possible to perceive the gentle movement of the heavenly spheres, and, in the end, the quiet breathing of a “light wind”, of the presence of God, “the most real Reality there is”—as the Pope has said—“a Reality that lies beyond the perceptible dimension”.
While we inquire how to give wings to the “new evangelisation” and its messages, we should not forget that their efficacy arises from listening. Their foundation is silence, full of the reality of the life of God. As the Prior also said, the hidden existence of the monks who, in God, experience a closeness to all people of the earth—and especially to those who are seeking, struggling, and suffering—“accompanies us and comforts us”.








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