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Silence will heal the wounds inflicted by the endless words that swarm around us, exhaust us, tire us beyond all tiredness. We need silence in our noisy, work–filled life, as a child needs its mother’s milk. We need to be alone with God.
We need to have a desert, be it only a corner of some apartment, some house, where we can go and rest with God. We need to follow him to some hill, to some garden where he himself was also wont to pray when he was tired and weary and distressed.
We need silence in order to be able to listen to our brothers, to listen with the heart. We need silence to open our souls to our brothers, making an inn for the thousands who may be living in palatial homes but have no place to lay their burdens of loneliness.
We need that silence to be able to speak a few words charged with our love, charged with Christ.
Excerpted from Welcome Pilgrim, (1991), p. 103, out of print
