In her book, The Taste of Silence, the spiritual writer Bieke Vandekerckhove shares through the crucible of a unique suffering of being hit at the tender age of nineteen with a terminal disease that promised not just an early death but also a complete breakdown and humiliation of her body enroute to that death.
Her attempt to cope with her situation drove her in many directions, initially to anger and hopelessness but eventually to monasteries, to the wisdom of monasticism, and, under its direction, into the deep well of silence, that desert that lurks so threateningly inside each of us. Away from all the noises of the world, in the silence of her own soul, inside the chaos of her raging, restless insides she found the wisdom and strength not just to cope with her illness but to also find a deeper meaning and joy in her life.
There are, as John Updike poetically puts it, secrets that are hidden from health, though, as Vandekerckhove makes evident, they can be uncovered in silence. However, uncovering the secrets that silence has to teach us is not easy. Silence, until properly befriended, is scary and the process of befriending it is the soul’s equivalent of crossing a hot desert. Our insides don’t easily become calm, restlessness doesn’t easily turn into solitude, and the temptation to turn to the outside world for consolation doesn’t easily give way to the idea of quiet.
But there’s a peace and a meaning that can only be found inside the desert of our own chaotic and raging insides. The deep wells of consolation lie at the end of an inner journey through heat, thirst, and dead ends that must be pushed through with dogged fidelity. And, as for any epic journey, the task is not for the faint of heart.
There’s a profound truth: Silence confronts us with an unbearable bottomlessness, and we have no choice but to align ourselves with the religious depth inside us. Sadly, for most of us, we will learn this only by bitter conscription when we have to actually face our own death.
But a journey into silence can take us beyond our dark fears and shine healing light into our darkest corners. The most spiritually rewarding trip we can make is an inner pilgrimage, into the desert of our own silence.
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