6th December, 2024
Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation (Franciscan Media, 2014), 25.
Image: Alison Woolley, Scotland, unsplash.com/@dralisonwoolley
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‘Silence attracts meaning. If you stay silent for a whole hour it will be hard not to write a poem.
In silence, everything becomes real. Everything deserves a poem. Silence discloses the fullness of the now, instead of always waiting and wanting more, instead of waiting for the next thing, the more exciting thing to happen. But what we have to remember is how we do anything is how we do everything. And how we do this moment is how we are going to do the next moment. And if we’re bored to death with this moment, we’re going to be bored to death with the next moment. We have to be awake right now. And we can be through silence. It is not a matter of being more moral but being more conscious—which will eventually make you much more moral! What it means to be vulnerable before a moment is to give it the power to change us. If we do not give another person, or emotion the power to influence us, to change us, then we are not intimate with the moment, not vulnerable before the only reality we have.
In many ways, intimacy before the moment, vulnerability in the presence of all reality, is the very name of spirituality. It would be indeed heroic if we could live our whole life inside of this kind of semi-permeable membrane. It would allow all events in, enough to really change us, and allow us out of our prisons—to change the world a bit, I would hope. If our spirituality does not make us more vulnerable, I doubt whether it is much good.
Silence, if you respond to a little bit of it, sort of hides. But if you remain open, then it reveals more. It reveals and hides, it reveals and hides, it reveals and hides. It waits and sees if you are going to use it in a non-manipulative way, and if you remain non-manipulative, it gives even more of itself. Please think about that for a while.
So be patient with silence. It gives a little, and then it gives more if you do not abuse the first little. It is like floating in water; once you stop fighting it, you float even better.'
Pages 25-26.