‘Present, yet Silent’
The material that St Beuno’s Outreach offers you this Holy Week takes inspiration from two complementary sources. The first is an article entitled ‘The Long Silence’ by Fr James Hanvey SJ (Thinking Faith, April 2021). The second is a little book called Finding Your Hidden Treasure: The Way of Silent Prayer (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2010) by Fr Benignus O’Rourke OSA (1929–2019).
Fr James writes of ‘the long silence of the Father from Gethsemane to Easter morning’. He observes that we may be tempted to interpret this silence as ‘an absence or a space to fill … but instead we should explore, embrace, and allow ourselves to be changed by it.’ In this, he encourages us to enter into ‘a silence which is not an absence, but the fullness of presence.’
Fr Ben O’Rourke, in a chapter called ‘Knitting Before the Face of God’, also talks about this quality of silence. He tells the story of an elderly woman, who, for the first time, experiences silent prayer as she knits. Here at home, in her peaceful room, she senses that ‘this silence was not simply an absence of noise, but that the silence had substance … a density, a richness … at the heart of the silence there was Him who is all stillness, all peace, all poise.’ As the woman knits, she seems to find what St Augustine realises is ‘the mystery of God who hides himself within us … [for] silence reveals God to us as nothing else can.’
Something similar is said about the God who dwells silently within us by the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart: ‘You need not seek him here or there; he is no further than the door of your heart.’ Perhaps we ourselves might try to explore and embrace the silence within us this Holy Week.
You can either access this resource to read online, or to print out as a booklet.
