The Friend of Silence

Music can lift the spirits. Those who make the music and those who hear the music can be struck at any moment by its simplicity, or complexity, its beauty, or it’s tension. Well-performed music tells not just one story, but a thousand: each performer brings an individual story of practice, success, failure, and perseverance, the composer brings life experience and musical ideas together into an organized interplay between the parties involved, the listeners bring their stories and pasts and let this new one wash over them, shaping or contextualizing theirs. There is such a beauty in the water that is song, and we are blessed to have a flowing font here on earth. Stories become more than words, and memories become not only one’s but passed on to every listener with an ounce-worth of empathy. The very fact that humanity has a song within its breast leaves a small space to doubt the absence of divinity in our world. At least a small space.

But though he may be likened to one, God is not a song. He is not music, although he may be present therein. He is also present in it’s absence. When the music fades, and all is stripped away, where is God? These words have echoed in my head like a mantra for weeks now as I reflect on our fortunate positions here as music ministers to the Catholic Church in Ireland. When the music fades, and all is stripped away… God certainly exists beyond even the glamorous confines of humanity’s musical capabilities. In the absence of a note or a tune or a ballad full of emotion, God is. God is infinitely more simple than the musical principles humans have spent centuries exploring to no end, yet he cannot be fully captured by this genre. God is light, God is Word, God is love, and each of these is simpler, richer, and more life-giving than any song.

The fading music here described is not just the dying of a tune, but the movement that occurs in every person’s daily life: a movement from that which stimulates to that which bores. The mind constantly seeks for physical, mental, and social activities that will feel engaging or stimulating, and then consequently must urge the body to rest in order to ensure future participation in the same activities: the cycle of activity and rest. Sleep for eight hours, work for sixteen, repeat. When the brain and the body rest, when the stimulating activities that we strive to fill our lives with drift to the background, what comes into the space? We rest, and know in that rest that we are replenished to live another day, and may come to the conclusion that each day’s activity and each night’s rest come to us as gifts. So when the stimuli of a day fades away and one stares at the dark bedroom ceiling before drifting off, what comes to mind? Can we not take a few minutes to come to Christ in these the waning moments of a day we can live over again? Time floats past us like a lusty tune, slipping through our fingers as we delight in it’s most fruitful and joyful moments, and we can stop to enjoy the tune at our given position within it or we can peer ever ahead to the anticipated climax. Give the moments back to Christ, as many of them as you can.

So when it all fades, we as Catholics come back to Christ. With no one else would we rather be at the end of a day, the end of a particularly difficult trial, or the end of a lifetime. He is the great silence that resolves a life’s worth of regrets, triumphs, joys, and pains. He is the only climax that brings lasting resolution, and the only Word that can punctuate the story of our lives. He completes our song.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature–trees, flowers, grass–grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls. – Blessed Teresa of Calcutta