Thought for the week: Remember to listen for the silence! - ​Rev Dr William Morton

​Now that we are well and truly on our journey through Lent, I was reflecting on making time for God, and time to reflect on our ourselves, and the need to block out so much of the noise and clamour around us.

I think, however, that the modern world dislikes silence. To encounter silence can actually be a shock, so accustomed have we become to the noise and pace of life.

A few years ago, I remember so well going into St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin late one night, and the silence was – and it might seem a strange word to use – deafening.

There’s a sense in which the world saves silence for special occasions when language is insufficient – as in acts of remembrance, and times of mourning.

It is as though only silence communicates what society wants and needs to say. Silence is not always intrusive, or startling, as in a sense of the absence of noise.

It can be so therapeutic for an individual to have a time of total silence, to refresh the mind, and to soothe the soul. But silence can occur, and be useful, in other ways as well.

In church, for example, in this season of Lent, silence can play a very important part in the worship of Almighty God.

Whereas before, or after, a church service there would normally be an organ voluntary, sometimes in Lent, in marking the solemnity of the season, there would be silence instead – not a silence which leaves a feeling of emptiness, but an eloquent silence, full of meaning, expressing something in its own right, which cannot be expressed in any other way.

Why not try today, in whatever the context, to savour a few moments of the sound of silence.

‘Speak, Lord, in the stillness, while we wait on Thee; hushed my heart to listen in expectancy.’