Teach us to care and not to care; Teach us to sit still. –T.S. Eliot

Silence is where we must go when we want to be truly spiritual people. Only there does God speak to the heart. But learning how to keep silent and when to keep silent—and when not to—is a great spiritual art.

Hard and bitter silence refuses to allow another person the chance to change the position that has hurt me. It refuses, as well, to allow me to understand the needs of those around me. Soft and pliant silence makes it possible for the other to speak. More than that, it enables me to see the world from someone else’s point of view.

Calm and receptive silence invites the ideas of those around me. It gives them dignity and value. It gives me another side to my personality.

Silence that is cowardly appears to agree with everyone but in the end contributes more to division than to unity. It questions nothing, understands nothing, advances nothing in a group. It is more about safety than it is about growth. “Sometimes,” the graffiti artist wrote, “silence is not golden–just yellow.”

Silence requires us to attend to the turmoil within us. It refuses to allow us to ignore our own greatest questions in life. The silence that seeks to bury our secrets from ourselves only eats away at our own souls.

There is no virtue in keeping silence in the face of injustice. That kind of silence only makes us either the accomplice or the thrall of those who refuse to allow another truth to be spoken. The silence we keep in the company of evil is evil. Truth spoken out of the hot center of the cave of silence is always a gift.

–from Aspects of the Heart
by Joan Chittister (Twenty-Third Publications)