As some background for those who aren’t familiar with my practice of silence, read here and here.

I’ve been engaging the practice of silence for a few months now. It involves a focused 20 minutes most mornings within my hour of prayer. It started out with an attempt at half an hour, but that was proving too difficult. It’s not easy. Keeping my mouth shut and not making a sound isn’t a problem, but to quiet the mind is difficult, even with the centering technique I use my mind flits from place to place, darting about wildly or wandering around aimlessly. In the moments where I have caught a glimpse of that inner stillness it has been profound, but those snatches of real inner silence have been few.

I have been reflecting on the difficulty of it lately and how that difficulty impacts other parts of my life and the conclusion is that the struggle of it is a good thing.

At face value you’d think inner silence would be easy – in theory it’s a simple activity and, for me, is born from a desire to ‘do’ absolutely nothing and just ‘be’ in a manner that is open to God. Simple. The fact that it has proven to be far from simple means I can’t feel proud of myself, there is no room for smugness and a sense of satisfaction in my activity and there is no way I can boast.

The flow on effect is the thought that if I struggle with something as simple as silence, connected to the very foundation of who I want to be, then who am I to boast or feel any sense of vanity about anything else that I do, all of which are lesser activities?

The struggle of inner silence is slowly pulling the rug out from under the arrogance and ego that permeates my life. If my time of silence feels like a crumpled ruin when I finish my prayer hour, who am I to boast about anything else I do that day – not that I feel bad, but it sure throws things into perspective.

In the face of my struggle for silence I am left with the words of the Psalmist:

But as for me, I am poor and needy; come quickly to me, O God. You are my help and deliverer; Lord, do not delay. -Psalm 70:5

My abilities, my material possessions, my financial wealth in global terms, the good things others say of me – these things are meaningless compared to unity with God and the beauty of true relationships with others. My struggle with these two things and infancy in both makes me poor and needy. The difficulty of the practice of inner silence has shed light on my poverty in the things that truly matter. I am reliant on God’s grace.