As a young adolescent, my Dad asked for the shovel. He was on his knees and was going to use the pipe handle to stretch against a chain as a pry bar. He swung around to get it, but I had already placed it close to him. The pipe handle hit him in the head and made a sound like "bong". He stared at me in silence, having said a thousand words with the look on his face. I went and sat in the truck until he came to get me. My silence said all I needed to say. We went and had lunch, talking like friends as if nothing had happened.
"He opened not His mouth" has deep meanings to me. Sometimes words need not be spoken. It is in this type silence my mind thinks tremendous thoughts, like being chased down a snow-covered hill, in between the blue spruce, by a bear.
Silence in the mind is totally something else. Silence when one has tinnitus can be quite a challenge. It is like standing near a waterfall in the forest, listening for a bluebird. When we find him, the waterfall's sound slowly decreases as the bluebird's song rises like the wind. In the silence of my mind is where my God I find. Yet, I hear Him in the waterfall, in the bluebird, in the falling snow crystals, in the sound of a hoot owl in the swamp late in the evening. We can actually hear something that helps us to find the silence we seek, as the sounds we hear are those we have learned to love.
To some, silence is the absence of noise. When we give thought to spiritual things, are we not still and silent...in a sense? We need not hide in a closet to find silence.
Silence to you all.
