Since Holy Week of 2021 the Seeds of Silence website has posted a weekly quote about silence each Monday..
In May 2022, a new quote series began, called 'Quoting Silence: A month with ... '.
In this series, we stay with quotes from one author throughout a whole month. 

September 2024's author is
​Rachel Muers.
​
​​​​This week's quote from her, and links to additional resources, are below.
To access the Quoting Silence Collection, which contains the entire back-catalogue of quotes and their additional resource links, click the buttons at the bottom of this page.​

This week's quote

Monday 16th September, 2024
Rachel Muers, Keeping God's Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 11. 
Image: Denise Sonnemberg, Lisbon, unsplash.com/@dsonnemberg
The short, image-backed quote, above, is taken from this week's longer quote, below, on pages 11-12 of Rachel Muers' book. ​​​To read more about her book, from which this month's quotes are taken, click here.
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Guided meditation
​​​​​​For a 5 minute audio guided meditation to accompany this week's short image-backed quote, click play button on the small image above. To pause, click in the same place.
Listen to the longer Quote:
To hear this week’s longer quote being read, click the play button on the image above. To see the image full screen as you listen, click the expand screen icon in the corner.

'Silence is neither the absence of speech nor its equivalent. It does not differ from utterances in the way that they differ one from another, and it does not differ from them as simply their negation or their absence, and yet it is in some way related to them. A very similar account of the relations of “difference” between God and creation underlies the practice of apophatic theology* – not simply denying all creaturely attributes of God, but denying even their negation.
 
The paradox here is that to say silence is in some way “like” God is apparently to say nothing of what God is “like.” It is, rather, to indicate how God’s nature transcends our way of comprehending it. More than this, it is, within the patristic and medieval traditions of negative theology, to say that God’s nature is as such incomprehensible; not, then, that we happen not to have the right set of verbal or conceptual tools, but that the subject matter itself  [i.e.God] cannot be spoken or conceived. Saying that God is silent, or that “nothing is so like God as silence,” is, for these theologians, not only saying something about our own inability to comprehend God; it is saying something about who God is in Godself, even if it is a paradoxical “something,” a something that does not enable us to claim comprehension of God.'

*Apophatic theology (also known as 'negative theology') is a theological approach that emphasizes describing God by negation — stating what God is not rather than what God is. It holds that because God is transcendent and beyond human comprehension, any positive descriptions or concepts we might apply to God are inherently limited and inadequate. Apophatic theology is often contrasted with cataphatic theology ('positive theology'), which attempts to describe God by affirming divine attributes, such as 'God is love' or 'God is omnipotent'. These two approaches are seen as complementary in many religious traditions.
To view all quotes and materials for Quoting Silence: A month with Rachel Muers, click the largest image-backed quote above or the button below.
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The Quoting Silence Collection

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The 'Quoting Silence:
​A month with ... ' Collection

From May 2022 the 'Quoting Silence: A month with ... ' quotes are building into a new collection over the year. From this collection, you'll be able to access all the quotes and resources from any month by clicking the button.

​To go to this new collection, click the button below.
You can search the entire website here.