I experienced something similar when I was 18 and seeking meaning in life.  At a concert of Handel’s Messiah, during the singing of the Hallelujah Chorus, Christ blew open an interior door that I never knew existed.  In fact, I didn’t know Christ, not really.  Inside that door was Jesus, with all His light, peace, glory, and immense, tender, overpowering love for me.  

Although the magnificent strains of the Hallelujah Chorus pulsated around and within me, a world of silence was also opened that revealed God and our interior union.  As I began to live from this inner chamber of silence, I would marvel that while I was fully present to my university classes or household chores, God’s voice and presence engaged me in a deeper and truer place.  Deep calls to deep in the roar of the waters (Ps 42:7).  

My initial encounter with the Silence of God was pure grace.  During my university years, I learned how to pray, to sink into his silence, to come to know my Beloved more intimately.  I assumed I would live forever in this bower of love until suddenly that door slammed shut, and all was darkness with a different, terrible silence that obscured God.  

For the first time since my conversion, Scripture was like ashes in the mouth, and my prayer was an agony of rejection.  Although I was sorely tempted to give up, I knew I could not survive without God, so I left all that was familiar and sought the Lord first as a guest in the Madonna House Apostolate in Canada, and then in a semi-eremitical community in the United States.  There I lived in a little cabin in the woods, with several hours of silence each day, and several days each month in solitude.  

Deep is calling on deep.  This amount of silence cannot be lived skimming the surface.  I had to dive through my nattering mind and ricocheting emotions to the core of my being, where God was waiting.  I had to journey deeper into silence.

I didn’t know how to enter, but my desperate need provided the key.  I begged God to take me to him in that silent, dark place, and he did.  At first a refreshing stillness greeted me, but then I became aware of pockets of hurt, anger and fear that had been shoved there through the years.  The price of diving to interior silence is confrontation with some of these unresolved areas.  Even though it felt fraught with danger, I knew it was the only way to true interior peace and integrity.  

Just as sleep is meant to restore the body, mind and emotions, so silence restores the spirit, the deepest part of our being.  With all the distractions, noise, confusions of modern life, we can bounce from one thought to another, one crisis to another, one obsession to another.  This constant noise can bleed out any sense of true self, or God’s presence.  When our core cannot be accessed, we often run, strive, work, play harder to avoid the unknown inside.  We sense that there is pain and longing there, so we try to live as if this world is everything.  But in so doing, we miss out on the most profound peace and restoration that is bestowed by being bathed in silence.  We begin to live from the choppy surface waters, instead of the silent, healing waters of the deep.  It’s like going without the restoration of deep sleep for too long – we become edgy, irritable, and eventually sick.

After 50 years of praying, of seeking and sinking into silence and solitude as often as possible, I thought this was a pathway that could never be threatened.  For the past 25 years, I lived in places of stunning rural beauty so I could always find a place in Nature for weekly poustinias, a Russian word meaning desert that refers to a way of praying in silence and solitude, prayer and fasting. Entering silence became fairly easy.  It was especially at night, when darkness had settled everything down, that my interior heart could open most freely.  In those settings, words faded and God’s presence was as the rays from the sun, warming and healing my soul.  

But 18 months  ago, I was sent to our house in Toronto, where sirens from nearby ambulance, police and fire stations scream their passage to rescue at any hour. Heavy trucks shake our house day and night. Drunken or drug-fuelled altercations pierce the night.  I do my best to be still and quiet, but it’s like a light sleep that is easily interrupted by noise.  

The deep restoration from proper sleep seems never to come. Resting in the arms of Silent Love seems to elude me.  Even in my beloved poustinia, city noises intrude and seem to prevent this entry.  It is part of the poustinia experience to fast from everything except bread, tea and the Scriptures, but the city poustinia also demands fasting from physical silence.  That is a biting sacrifice.  

When I arrived in Toronto, my primary struggle was how to find interior silence in.  At first, I resolved to wear ear plugs, to exercise discipline in blocking out the noise, to “fight” the din.  But the noise is the cry of people in distress: the homeless or those suffering from mental health issues, others fighting for their lives and being whisked to a hospital;  frayed nerves given voice by honking horns.  How can I block out the cries of my brothers and sisters just so I can have some peace and quiet?

 My next attempt was to try to integrate these sounds of desperation into my prayer, so they would be occasions for intercession. Lord, please cover that person in the ambulance with your peace – Lord, please soothe that man tormented by drugs. Lord, please make your presence known to all these people rushing about and glued to their phones. 

My current approach, is to claim the truth that in the depths of my heart, I live in a profound union of love with God, a union that is unaffected by surface noise.  As St John Eudes so beautifully expressed this conviction: “You are one with Jesus as the body is one with the head.  You must, then, have one breath with Him, one soul, one life, one will, one mind, one heart.  And he must be your breath, heart, love, life, your all”.  

I may not feel this union. I may long for silence to even hear my own breathing. But I can call upon this reality.  When I walk home from Mass along the busy streets, I can breathe out the Lord I have just received.  I can breathe out prayer that mingles with the exhaust fumes from cars and the squeal of bus tires.  That breath, those prayers are the breath of Our Lord, breathing peace upon his people.

St Augustine wrote that if you desire to pray, you are already praying;  if you desire God, you already know him.  I would say that if you desire to sink into silence, you are already there in that inner chamber, where He lives in union with your spirit.  Claim it!

(Cheryl Ann Smith is the director of Madonna House Toronto.)