Into the Silent Land

The Sacramentality of Silence

There was a time, in my years of priestly formation, when I thought silence meant simply being good at keeping quiet. I was wrong. Silence is not being quiet or a churchwarden shushing you in church.

Silence, as I discovered during those 3 years of being chiselled away at in a monastery, is not the absence of noise; it is the presence of God. It is not about shutting the world out but about letting the soul breathe again. I went into that season thinking silence would be easy, but I soon learned that true silence does not begin outside you. It begins inside, where the noise is loudest.

Three years in a monastery will teach you that.

I learned that silence is not an escape from life but an entry into it. It has a strange way of unmasking you. When the talking stops and the distractions are gone, you begin to see yourself as you truly are, impatient, fidgety, and full of unfinished conversations. Yet in that raw honesty, grace begins its quiet work. Silence has a chisel of its own.

In the monastery, the days were shaped by prayer, labour, study, and recreation. The bells would ring for Matins in the early dark, and we would file into the chapel, cold wood , flickering candles, the faint scent of incense still hanging from the day before. There were no microphones or chatter, only a rhythm of psalms and pauses that seemed to breathe with the building.

At first, that silence felt heavy, almost threatening. My thoughts were loud; my worries had nowhere to hide. Thomas Merton once wrote that the greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds. He was right.

Gradually, the quiet began to do its work. Beneath the noise of my own thoughts another sound began to emerge; not audible, yet unmistakable. It was what the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing calls a dart of longing love, that gentle, wordless movement of the soul towards God.

I began to understand what St Benedict meant when he said that silence leads to humility. It is not that silence makes you small; it is that it reminds you who you really are before the immensity of God. You stop needing to be impressive. You learn to be present.

The Silence After Mass

Twenty years later, that same silence greets me when the last parishioner has gone after Mass, whether during the week or on a Sunday morning. The sacristy is tidied, the candles extinguished, the door pulled to. I sit for a few moments in that space beloved of me, the sanctuary lamp flickering against the brass. The building seems to exhale. The noise of the day, the greetings, the laughter, the worries, the pastoral conversations, drifts quietly away.

It is in those moments that I often feel closest to the God who called me. There is nothing to say and nothing to prove, only a deep sense of presence, quiet, gentle, unhurried. Henri Nouwen once described the priest as a living reminder of Christ. If that is true, then silence is how we remain reminded ourselves. Without it, we lose the thread. We become professionals of the sacred instead of lovers of the divine.

The silence of a church after Mass is different from the silence of a monastery, but it carries the same invitation, Be still, and know that I am God.

The Healing Work of Silence

Silence can be painful before it becomes beautiful. In some of the hardest seasons of my life, in times of grief, exhaustion, relapse or recovery, silence felt unbearable. I did not want to sit still with myself, let alone with God. But healing is often quieter than we imagine. It does not always come through more prayer, more words, or more effort. It comes through trust, through the decision to stay still even when the heart aches. In silence, we stop performing. We give up control. We let God be God.

Romano Guardini once said that to worship is to stand in silence before the face of God. It is that same silence, reverent, humble, and honest, that eventually mends the cracks within us. The silence I once feared has become my refuge. Not because I am good at it, but because I have found that in silence, I meet a God who does not demand eloquence, only presence.

As priests, we speak for a living. We preach, teach, comfort, and bless. Yet there are moments when words fail, in a hospital room, at a graveside, beside someone’s pain, and it is then that silence becomes pastoral. People do not always need our explanations. Sometimes they just need our stillness. When I sit beside a grieving family and say nothing, when I pray quietly with someone who has lost their faith, that silence becomes a kind of sacrament, a channel through which love and understanding pass without words.

Merton once wrote that silence is the mother of truth. In the end, that is why it matters so much for priests, because we are meant to live from truth, not from noise.

I think often of that moment in the Mass after the consecration when everything stops. The priest lifts the Host, the bell rings, and then there is silence. It is the most charged moment of the liturgy. The world seems to hold its breath. That silence is not a pause between prayers; it is the prayer itself. It is the meeting point of heaven and earth, a silence filled with adoration, awe, and love. The longer I serve as a priest, the more I realise that the silence at the altar sustains everything else. It is where I remember who I am and why I am here.

Guarding the Gift

Silence, like any sacrament, must be guarded. The phone, the inbox, the endless hum of digital life are all enemies of contemplation. I have learned to set boundaries, no phone on in the church, no email before morning prayer, no parish notifications in the evening. These are not acts of austerity; they are acts of self respect. They make room for grace. In a culture addicted to noise, silence becomes an act of defiance, even of faith. To be still is to declare that God is God and we are not. It is to say, the world can wait.

The Silence That Abides

Sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the dog is asleep, I lay in the dark and simply breathe. I do not try to pray. I just let the silence hold me. I remember those monastic nights, the long offices, the cool stone beneath my knees, the silence so deep it seemed alive. That silence never really left me. It lives on in every pause, every Mass, every wordless prayer. It is the silence that calls me back when I lose my way, as I often do.

Silence, I have come to believe, is the first language of God. Everything else is translation.

The sacramentality of silence is that it makes God tangible without needing proof. It is where presence becomes real. In a priest’s life, it is the hidden thread that holds everything together. We talk much about vocation, about ministry and mission. But beneath it all, beneath every sermon and sacrament, every act of care, lies this quiet truth, we are sustained by a silence that is not empty but full, not passive but alive.

The silence that formed me in the monastery continues to form me still. When my own words grow tired, I return to that inner cloister where the only sound is love itself. The priest who learns to love silence learns how to listen. And listening is the beginning of everything holy.

Fr Gareth Jones