Quoting Silence, March 2025:
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A post throughout each week of the month, offering quotes and resources linked to one contemporary author who writes about silence and its role as a spiritual discipline. |
The first week of each month has a short, image-backed quote with links to associated resources in the text below it. In other weeks, the short quote is taken from a longer one by the month's author, found below the image. The last week of the month has a short quote and questions to encourage reflection on all the month's quotations and images.
Caroline Oakes, our author for March, is an internationally known author and speaker, teaching about everyday spirituality and the human spirit.
You can read more about Caroline Oakes' book, Practice the Pause: Jesus’ Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
You can read more about Caroline Oakes' book, Practice the Pause: Jesus’ Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), from which this month's quotes are taken, by clicking here.
Audio resources
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For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to use with each week's short quote, click play on the image. To pause and restart click the same place.
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An audio guided Lectio Divina for the longer quotes. Click play on the image above. Allow 10-15 minutes for this. For a text version, click the button.
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Monday 3rd March, 2025
Caroline Oakes, Practice the Pause: Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 188.
Images: Kelly Sikkema, Iowa, USA, unsplash.com/@kellysikkema
and David Beale, Nashville, USA, unsplash.com/@davidbeale
and David Beale, Nashville, USA, unsplash.com/@davidbeale
Caroline Oakes, our author for this month, lives in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. Prior to writing her book, Practicing the Pause: Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What It Means to Be Fully Human (Broadleaf Books, 2023), from which our quotes for March will be taken, she worked as a publicist and copy editor, and was also known as a writer of essays, often with a spiritual theme. You can find a couple of these, about spiritual practice and Advent, written for the famous Huffington Post here, and another about halloween, called 'Facing our darkness on halloween night', written for Krista Tippet's widely known On Being project, here.
Although you won't pick this up form the quotes about silence that we engage with this month, a large section of Caroline's book is about how neuroscience is uncovering that an intentional practice of silence - even as brief as a sever second 'pause' - is rewiring the neuronal connections in our brains. You can hear her speaking and offering teaching from her book in a 40 minute podcast with Compass: Finding Spirituality in the Everyday, here, or nearly an hour on a podcast called The Church Needs Therapy, here. You can also hear about 50 minutes' worth of her book being read (by an AI voice, sadly, but still ...) on an audiobook preview, here. There are multiple reviews of her book available online but for a mid-range length one, see here.
Since publishing her book Caroline has become more widely known throughout the USA and Europe as a speaker and spiritual director. In early May this year she will be the speaker for the 2025 Calvin W. Didier Annual Seminar on Religion and Contemporary Thought. It's not yet clear if this will be accessible online but you can find out more in the coming weeks by clicking here.
Caroline Oakes has her own website, here, where you can sign up to receive her usually monthly blog posts.
Monday 10th March, 2025
Caroline Oakes, Practice the Pause: Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 226.
Image: Getty Images for Unsplash, unsplash.com/gettyimages
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 225-226 of Caroline Oakes' book. To read more about the from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'Thomas Keating speaks to how the quiet and the fullness of silence can somehow break through the business and uncertainty of our lives and make us aware of the spirit of God within us and all around us.
"We rarely think of the air we breathe, yet it is in us and around us all the time. In similar fashion, the presence of God penetrates us, is all around us, is always embracing us. Our awareness, unfortunately, is not awake to that dimension of reality. The purpose of contemplative prayer, the sacraments, spiritual disciplines, is to awaken us."*
The image of the movement and love of the presence of God being completely a part of us and around us all the time is one of my favourite ways of understanding all the ways God "is." As the psalmist said, we live and move and have our being in the spirit of God (Psalm 78:39). Which means—have you heard this?—humans asking the question ‘What is God?’ Is like a fish asking another fish, "What is water?"
The flow and movement and power and love of God is—and is always present as the wholly and sustaining conversation between all the elements of creation: between the stars and the planets, between the trees and the air and us, even between the elements of our own body, mind, and spirit. When Moses asked for a name, God simply responded, "I … AM." You can almost imagine the shrug.
So God is, all the while we are generally caught up in the doing of the moment rather than being in the moment, so we aren’t always aware and awake to the ongoing movement and flow and Presence that simply is.'
* Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel (Continuum, 1995), 44.
Monday 17th March, 2025
Caroline Oakes, Practice the Pause: Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 188.
Image: Hadis Safari, Tblisi, unsplash.com/@ihadissafari
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 188-189 of Caroline Oakes' book. To read more about the from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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'As impossible as it is for us to imagine today, during the first centuries of Christianity, the spiritual practice of taking a few minutes to be alone in quiet, wordless "rest in God" was the completely natural and expected outcome of daily prayer and scripture reading. This silent, apophatic* time of prayer was integral to Christian practice, as modelled and taught first by Jesus and then by the desert mothers and fathers.
We know now that it is this apophatic aspect of early Christians’ prayer—being beyond words, thoughts, and feelings—that brings a deep and fully experiential kind of knowledge by engaging our whole being—body, heart, soul, and spirit—and not just the mind. And it is this apophatic practice that is being revitalised today.
If we want to change at a fundamental level, if we want to rid ourselves of the unconscious psychological baggage that often triggers our fight/flight impulses and gets in our way of living from our essential, true self, our Source, the divine in us, we have to actually engage in a practice of being in silence and solitude with God.
It is this practice that shifts our spiritual attentiveness in ways we can otherwise come to know about only conceptually. The contemplative pause-release-return rhythm of intentional practice in silence and solitude with God incorporates a new awareness, a new and expanded way of being, into our intuition, into our psyche, and into our bodies. We are changed from the inside out, so to speak.
So if we are to truly know and understand the power of the transformative contemplative practice of Jesus to change us in ways that we can fully embody, we ourselves must decide to begin an intentional steady practice of our own.'
* Apophatic prayer does not engage what theologians call the ‘faculties’ – the normal human operating systems of reason, memory, imagination, feelings and will that connect us to our interior life and to the outside world, and which are used in our cataphatic prayer and practices. Instead, apophatic prayer bypasses the faculties of our usual mental processes and from their perspective can feel like emptiness or nothing. Hence, the apophatic is sometimes described as ‘formless’ prayer or the via negativa. However, as we begin to develop a more subtle discrimination within apophatic prayer, we discover that it is far from either empty or formless.
Monday 24th March, 2025
Caroline Oakes, Practice the Pause: Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 230.
Image: Cristina Gottardi, Milan, Italy, unsplash.com/@cristina_gottardi
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 229-230 of Caroline Oakes' book. To read more about the from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Listen to this week's longer quote:
To listen to the longer quote, below, being read, click the play button on the small version of the image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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‘We can make contemplative prayer our daily practice both within the few intentional moments we devote to sitting and just being, alone, with God and then by attempting to carry the Spirit of that encounter into the rest of the moments of our daily life. …
In the way a retreat is a rest from the emotional turmoil of our lives, twenty minutes of contemplative prayer can be a mini-retreat from the swirl of daily living, a mini-retreat from the spin of our own daily preoccupations. …
When I began having monthly sessions with a spiritual director, at the beginning of each session, she would invite me to sit in silence for a few minutes, as long as I wanted. I began noticing that in those moments of silence, even if I was sitting there still in the swirl of everything that was on my mind, I found I would settle into a clearer way of seeing things. My spiritual director told me that sitting in intentional silence “in God” in this way often invites our entire being to relax and “shed our roles.” In moments like these, we let go of each of our outer, more egoic selves— our job titles, the parts we play in our daily lives, even “wife,” “mother,” “sister,” “friend,” “minister.” We find our goodness within ourselves. We come close to the essence of who we are, the “I am’ of who we are in God.”’
Monday 31st March, 2025
Caroline Oakes, Practice the Pause: Jesus' Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What it Means to be Fully Human (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 115.
Image: Jason Mavrommatis, Patra, Greece, unsplash.com/@jeisblack
The last week of each month offers some questions to help you reflect further on its quotations and images, and how they resonate with your own spiritual journey and relationship with God.
You can engage with these using the written or audio versions of the questions, below.
The last week of each month offers some questions to help you reflect further on its quotations and images, and how they resonate with your own spiritual journey and relationship with God.
You can engage with these using the written or audio versions of the questions, below.
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Listen to the reflection questions:
To listen to the reflection questions, below, being read, click the play button on the 'Reflect ...' image next to or below this text. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner. |
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Reflection questions:
Before reflecting on this month's quotes and images, take time to re-ground yourself in your body.
Perhaps take a few slow breaths, feel your feet on the floor and be aware of how your body feels in this moment.
1) Read back over or listen again to this month's quotes and spend time looking at their associated images. As you do so, note a phrase or image that draws your attention. If this is a phrase, you might like to write this out in a journal or on a piece of paper where you will see it regularly. Consider reading aloud several times what you have written to help the words sink more deeply into your heart. If an image resonates with you, let your gaze rest lightly on it for a couple of minutes, allowing it to speak to your heart. Consider using it as a screensaver for a while, or perhaps print it out and place it somewhere that you will see it often.
2) What emerges as you sit with the phrase or image that attracted your attention? Does a new insight or a question, emotion or sensation arise? Take some time to write down and ponder on whatever you notice.
3) Where can you see hope in the midst of what is emerging in you, for yourself, your neighbour, your community, or the planet? How might this impact your daily life and those with whom you share it?
4) In the days and weeks to come, how can you stay open to what you have discovered from your reflections?
Take some time to give thanks for the hope that you have found in this month's quotes and images.