The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise

by Robert Sarah

“Carthusian spirituality was born of the encounter of a soul and a place, from the coincidence between a desire for a quiet life in God and a landscape, Cartusie solitudinem, as the ancient documents describe it, the isolation and wild beauty of which attracts souls to even greater solitude, far from the ‘fugitive shadows of the world’, allowing men to pass ‘from the storm of this world to the tranquil, sure repose of the port’.

Prayer offered up at night possesses a great power, more than the prayer of the day-time. Therefore all the righteous prayed during the night, while combatting the heaviness of the body and the sweetness of sleep and repelling corporeal nature. . . . There is nothing that even Satan fears so much as prayer that is offered during the vigilance at night. . . . For this reason the devil smites them with violent warfare, in order to hinder them, if possible, from this work

The one who keeps vigil at night goes out of himself, the better to find God. The silence of night is the most capable of crushing all the dictatorships of noise. When darkness descends upon the earth, the asceticism of silence can acquire more luminous dimensions.

Stat Crux dum volvitur orbis—the world turns and the Cross remains.

“although speech characterizes man, silence is what defines him, because speech acquires sense only in terms of this silence.”

Silence is difficult, but it makes man able to allow himself to be led by God. Silence is born of silence. Through God the silent one, we can gain access to silence. And man is unceasingly surprised by the light that bursts forth then. Silence is more important than any other human work. For it expresses God. The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and others so as to place ourselves humbly and generously at their service” (Thought 68, The Power of Silence).

The greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice.

Actually, it is through long hours of poring over Sacred Scripture, after resisting all the attacks of the Prince of this world, that we will reach God.

There is no place on earth where God is more present than in the human heart. This heart truly is God’s abode, the temple of silence.

The Father waits for his children in their own hearts.

The word is not just a sound; it is a person and a presence. God is the eternal Word, the Logos.

God achieves everything, acts in all circumstances, and brings about all our interior transformations. But he does it when we wait for him in recollection and silence.

At that moment nothing appears externally, but in the silence, in the depths of his being, there is a true and real identification with Christ.

Silence is the law of the divine plans.

12. Silence is not an absence. On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences.

All activity must be preceded by an intense life of prayer, contemplation, seeking and listening to God’s will.

For man can encounter God in truth only in silence and solitude, both interior and exterior.

Silence not a virtue, noise not a sin. True. But the turmoil and confusion and constant noise of modern society are the expression of the ambiance of its greatest sins—its godlessness, its despair.

Catholics who associate themselves with that kind of noise, who enter into the Babel of tongues, become to some extent exiles from the city of God.

Man controls his hours of activity if he knows how to enter into silence. The life of silence must be able to precede the active life.

Sounds and emotions detach us from ourselves, whereas silence always forces man to reflect upon his own life.

True witness is expressed by the silent, pure, radiant example of the sanctity of our life.

Contemplatives are the greatest evangelizing and missionary force, the most important and most precious organ that transmits life and maintains the essential energy throughout the body.

Christ lived for thirty years in silence. Then, during his public life, he withdrew to the desert to listen to and speak with his Father. The world vitally needs those who go off into the desert. Because God speaks in silence.

“Without God, we are too poor to be able to help the poor!”

If we want to grow and to be filled with the love of God, it is necessary to plant our life firmly on three great realities: the Cross, the Host, and the Virgin: crux, hostia, et virgo. . . . These are three mysteries that God gave to the world in order to structure, fructify, and sanctify our interior life and to lead us to Jesus. These three mysteries are to be contemplated in silence.

Man is invited to enter into himself so as to remain alone with God.

Contemplative silence is a fragile little flame in the middle of a raging ocean. The fire of silence is weak because it is bothersome to a busy world.

Silence is the outer wall that we must build in order to protect an interior edifice.

originally man was destined to live with God. But by giving in to sin, he was not only driven out of paradise but also out of himself and was abandoned in exteriority and darkness.

In order to be able to love God much in Heaven, it is necessary first to love him much on earth.

In a letter, Saint Augustine writes seriously: “The glory of this age passes; on Judgment Day all these honors will be good for nothing. It is not my intention to waste my life on the vanity of ecclesiastical honors. I think of the day when I will have to render an accounting for the flock that has been entrusted to me by the Prince of pastors. Understand my fears, because my fears are great.”

A priest must be in the hands of the Holy Spirit. If he strays from the Spirit, he will be doomed to carry out a merely human work.

It is necessary to protect precious silence from all parasitical noise. The noise of our “ego”, which never stops claiming its rights, plunging us into an excessive preoccupation with ourselves. The noise of our memory, which draws us toward the past, that of our recollections or of our sins. The noise of temptations or of acedia, the spirit of gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sadness, vanity, pride—in short: everything that makes up the spiritual combat that man must wage every day. In

And yet, Father Jacques Mourad, a Syro-Catholic priest who was held hostage by ISIS for almost five months, was able to say upon leaving that hell: “God gave me two things, silence and kindness.”

poverty; in him there is no trace of possessiveness.

If the Church talks too much, she falls into a form of ideological logorrhea.

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt is the work of an atheist walled up in himself, without any horizon and, therefore, without any exit that could give him access to the Invisible One who directs his life.

“Every day I shut myself into a threefold castle: the first is the most pure Heart of Mary. . . , against all the attacks of the Evil Spirit; the second is the Heart of Jesus, against all the attacks of the flesh; the third is the holy sepulcher, where I hide myself next to Jesus from the world.”