“The less form in religion the better, since God is a Spirit; … the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a Spirit.” That’s what William Penn said over 300 years ago, urging Christians to embrace silence as a way to encounter God. Taking time to think about using silence as a religious practice extends Penn’s invitation to us today. That’s because Penn wasn’t talking not about stillness, as such, but rather about encountering God in a living and vital holy hush. This spiritual silence encourages us as we travel along our journey to a quiet inner place where God teaches us. It is a place where we can come “to receive freely from Him,” as George Fox said.This deep silence of the soul can be our Eucharist. Rufus Jones said of sacramental silence that, “it may be an intensified pause, a vitalized hush, a creative quiet, an actual moment of mutual and reciprocal correspondence with God. The actual meeting of man with God and God with man is the very crown and culmination of what we can do with our human life here on earth.”
Holy silence invites us to an immediate personal encounter with God. Quaker silence is communion with God. As one group of Friends wrote, “In silence, without rite or symbol, we have known the Spirit of Christ so convincingly present … [that] this is our Eucharist and our Communion.”
That is the sort of communion my soul craves.
-- Brent
