When I first went public with the intent to go into silence for three months, just about everyone asked the same question. “Aren’t you even going to talk to Joel?” Joel is my beloved husband who just recently retired along with me after co-pastoring an active church on midcoast Maine for the last eighteen years. Our personal and work lives have been so intertwined that it seemed impossible that I would make a decision to take this separate path. Especially while living in the same house.
The first thing I want to say is that keeping silence is about more than “not talking.” It is, I think, about attending to life and the world in a more intentional way, including attending to the man who lives in my house. We will not be fully separate in this silence.
But it will be different. We will not be filling our space with words, or at least, I won’t. My own spoken words, the television chatter, music lyrics, all will cease. I will be listening to and for something else, something I haven’t allowed myself much of since entering ministry, which is ironic since I do have a strong feeling that silence is the environment in which God dwells. I love Meister Eckhart’s assertion that there is “nothing so much like God as silence.” So I can pretty confidently say that all of this springs from my deep longing for God, whoever, wherever, and whatever that is!
Dwelling in Presence 