Silent and Absent

To be alone in the silence hopefully waiting on God can be a frightening thing.  He might not make an appearance.  There may not even be a single soft word whispered.  There may be nothing there but an even deeper silence and a greater sense of Absence.  It can be such an overwhelming moment of emptiness that it is too difficult to muster up enough from within to enter again at a later time into the silence.   

 

What does it mean when our hope for a voice and a Presence is filled only with a silence and an Absence?  Perhaps, Jesus wondered such thoughts in that horrible moment of darkness when He was at the edge of death on the cross.  Is God ever truly silent and absent?  Is it possible that He speaks in the silence in ways that are so beyond the boundaries of our expectations and hope that we are simply unable to hear? If it is true that He is out there in the silence seeking to help us find new ears to hear, then He is not really the Absent One, but the Mysterious One.

 

When the silence seems unending and seems filled with no Presence, the only thing we can do is wait.  Oh, we can, of course, give up and go elsewhere with our attentiveness, but we can also wait.  The waiting may transcend the time we can physically wait in the silence, but there is also the sense in which we can take the silence within with us into whatever it is that awaits us.  Maybe a part of what we learn in those moment of taking the silence within into the world is how we can live in the busy spaces of life with an awareness of the Quiet Presence within us.