Ministry as Gift & Task

Dr. J.F. Lacaria, Director

Leadership Formation and Ministry Support

Silence:  One of God's Comforts

The Spirit of God accompanies us on our journey through life, granting comfort in unexpected blessings.  I received such Spirit-borne comfort in an unexpected silence that fell over my mother and me as she neared the end of this part of her life.  I am not certain whether it was silence that bore the comfort, or just the end of talking – communicating - seeking words to fill the space that surrounded us. In any sense, my mother and I spent the last six months of our time together in silence, no longer attempting to have a conversation.  In The Way of the Heart, Henri Nouwen states, “in our chatty world, in which the word has lost its power to communicate, silence helps us to keep our mind and heart anchored in the future world and allows us to speak from there a creative and re-creative word to the present world.”

I cannot say that my mother and I embraced silence as the better way, although we had experimented with it in the past.  Back in junior high school, when I knew everything, my mom and I gave up arguing for Lent one year, we were worn out from the constant bickering and arguments, and she wanted to try out a time of semi-silence, arguing was our chief mode of communicating.  It was a worthy discipline and brought peace between us.  But our recent silence was thrust upon us by my mother’s dementia and Alzheimer’s. It was certainly not our choice.

Prior to the arrival of silence, “Increasing Your Word Power” in the Reader’s Digest was one of our pastimes, digging up and telling family stories and secrets was what brought us joy.  But, as each day brought mother increased struggles in finding words, hanging onto thoughts, making it to the end of a sentence, we slipped into silence, the silence that comes from not speaking. 

Any ideas on my part of continuing our communication through a one-sided chattiness offered no promise. I approached the impending silence with a note of sadness, but I did not want it to drive me into despairing one more thing lost. Time was precious; we still had each other’s presence; perhaps, we no longer needed worded communication. 

It was while thinking this I remembered that our relationship was built on a lengthy time without words, when I was the one without vocabulary.  Our time together began in joyful wordless wonder and curiosity, and it could end in the same way.  So, without discussion or agreement, we fell into silence and into each other in a new way.  We knew one another through touching, acting in concert, marveling with our fingers and hands, speaking with our eyes, often sharing things for which there were no words.

Jerome Berryman, author of Godly Play, writes about a gateway in life “at which point we regain sensitivity to the kinds of knowing we had before language, …where our relationships count for more than words; at this ‘place’ in life, one knows that this is true, but people who know do not need to speak about it.” (from “ Silence is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Teaching Silence and the Further of Humankind,” Religious Education, Summer, 1999.)

And thus, my mother and I received silence as one of God’s final comforts, and in speechless wonder we cared and carried each other to our new way of being together. From this I learned that the end of talking does not demand sadness, silence is a gift that points to that which is beyond speech.