On a recent Monday morning, a time when I regularly gather with my praying friends, we decided to begin in silence together, rather than opening with spoken prayers. We set a timer for five minutes. One friend sat with expectation for a word from God. Another worried that she would not be able to quiet her mind. The minutes passed slowly. Or quickly. When the chime sounded, we asked each other what God said to us in the silence. 

Oh, how unschooled in silence we are! I imagine our little experiment would give a contemplative like Thomas Merton a good belly laugh. A mere five minutes of quiet was a battle fought with expectation. We can call it naïve. Or maybe it was our right-brained religious upbringings showing themselves. Perhaps we were just acting out of living in the West. 

Despite the lack of revelations emerging from the silence that morning, we all agreed that it is something we need to practice more. We don’t have to taste an apple to believe the seed will sprout. Just as the crops waited through Elijah’s prayers, seeds of silence sprout in God’s timing. Cultivating space for silence – to be, to listen – is a practice. What – and when – we hear from God is a mystery. Silence is a way to show up to that mystery, open to the fallowness of “hearing nothing” or the sweet whisper of the voice we know to be God.