Lessons from the Silence 4

As well as its other effects, silence also helps to reveal one's essential helplessness in life.  Although I still lived in my home, and (once I felt well) saw people in the community, there was a sense in which not speaking prevented lots of things which produce, perhaps normally, unrecognised background noise to life.  You can't just speak for the sake of it and fill up the void with words, you can't talk fast and long during an adrenaline fuelled crisis, you can't just phone someone or stop someone to speak to because you don't want to be alone with your thoughts.

And this, I think, produced a sense of need: a more urgent realisation of the need for the presence and grace of God.  Which leaves another question:  how much of life is noise and activity and maybe superfluous yakking in order to cover up, on the one hand, how not-in-control of life we are, and on the other, our desperate need for the moment by moment conscious life with God?