Last Friday, while on a retreat at Koinonia Retreat Center, I made my way down to the shores of Lake Sylvia. I walked slowly out onto the frozen lake aware that the colorful ice houses normally dotting the scene were absent. The winter has simply been too mild to risk setting up housekeeping in the middle of the lake. Far out on the frozen water, two lonely ice fishermen stood, auger in hand, having just drilled a hole in the ice to wet their lines. Brave souls. The temperatures were mild, the scene a blanket of white.

That’s when I noticed it. The sound, or lack of sound, that has been missing in this less than wintery winter. Normally, when the snow falls and covers everything around in its thick, sound-muffling blanket, there are the moments when you can become aware of what I always think of as ‘the sound of sheer silence.’ This phrase comes to me from the experience of God that the prophet Elijah has on Mount Horeb: ‘The angel said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before God, for the Holy One is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before God but God was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but God was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.’ It was in this sound of sheer silence that Elijah experienced God.

Certainly over the years many people have come to know the presence of the Holy in the sounds of silence. It is a rare thing these days, silence. We are surrounded by sounds, chosen or otherwise, wherever we go. Many of us cannot stand to be in a room that is completely silent. We have the television or radio or our computers playing some kind of sound, music or voices, to keep us from walking completely into the silence. Some of this is simple personality type. We extroverts like to have the sense that we are surrounded by at least the sounds of people all the the time. It brings us energy. Our introverted brothers and sisters are often much better with silence.

So here are some questions: When was the last time you experienced silence? How did it feel? Was it comforting or anxiety producing? Did it highlight aloneness or make you pleased to be spending time with yourself? Are you good company?

The mystics of years gone by and of today know the gift of silence. It is in these times of an absence of sound in which we come to connect with the movement of our own breath, the rising and falling of our chest as it signals our aliveness. In silence we can come to know the beating of our heart, remember its rhythm, find a walking pace that tunes us to an awareness of other beings and landscapes that travel with us on a daily basis. Silence can offer the gift of being awake to observing the Holy’s movement in Creation. It is the leveler of distractions.

And on certain days, silence becomes the entry point to an experience of the Sacred. Standing on a frozen lake, waters alive with a spring that is yet to be moving unseen beneath my feet, I had just such an experience. On my drive to this retreat, there had been the sounds of cars whizzing by on the freeway, but God was not found for me in their automated chugs and whirrs; and from the sounds of the radio,music pleasing enough and news blaring its terror, but God was not present to me in the airwaves full of things to amuse or produce fear; there were my plans and notebooks and hopeful intentions for the retreat that was to follow, but God did not at that moment show up even in these.

Instead it was the gift of no sound at all, the enveloping of the sound of sheer silence that wrapped me in a cloak of comfort and knowing, a deep knowing, that I am, we all are, a part of something immense. This Something does not need to always dazzle or shout out our name. Sometimes, in fact most often, we are reminded of this Presence in the silence.

An invitation this day is to find yourself some silence. Rest in it. Allow it to have its way with you. Like Elijah, allow your life to be changed. And be grateful.