This Becoming Gift Segment proposes fasting from unnecessary speech and explores the benefits of silence and listening. The conversation emphasizes the importance of silence for healing, spiritual growth, and genuine connection with others and God.

Key Takeaways

* Fasting from unnecessary speech can help us overcome an attachment to idle words that can slow our spiritual growth.

* Contemporary research has demonstrated that noise can harm and silence can heal.

* Silence enables us to encounter others and God. Deep listening is an antidote to isolation and loneliness.

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Essay

During Lent, we should consider deeper interior disciplines like fasting from idle speech. This is deliberate choice to embrace silence so we might listen to God, to others, and to our own interior. In a world saturated with noise, this fasting becomes a radical act of spiritual generosity, one that heals the soul even as it challenges our natural impulse to fill every quiet moment with our own voice.

The Catholic tradition proposes a discipline of avoiding idle words, speech that is unnecessary, excessive, or inappropriate. For cloistered religious, silence is woven into the fabric of daily life, yet even in the convent it can be elusive. St. Teresa of Avila, the great mystical doctor of the Church, confessed that for over a decade she hindered her own spiritual growth by lingering too long in the convent parlors. Though many of her conversations were spiritual in tone, they were often unnecessary, driven more by the pleasure of talking than by genuine need. When she renounced this attachment, the profound mystical experiences began unfolding in her soul. Her example reminds us that even “good” speech can become an obstacle when it displaces the solitude our state in life calls us to.

Blaise Pascal observed in his Pensées that “all the unhappiness of man arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” (Pascal, Pensées, 139) Even before the advent of the radio, television, and internet we were driven out of silence and solitude by restless loneliness, incapable of being with ourselves and listening for God

Scientists have corroborated what the tradition proposes. The World Health Organization has documented that environmental noise ranks second only to air pollution as a cause of disease burden. One in three people suffer daytime annoyance and one in five experience sleep disturbance from traffic, rail, and air traffic noise, elevating risks of cardiovascular disease and hypertension (source). By contrast, another study found that just two hours of uninterrupted silence stimulates neurogenesis in the hippocampus, the brain region associated with memory and learning (source). The body literally begins to repair and grow in the absence of sound.

Silence is more than the mere cessation of noise. In his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Robert Cardinal Sarah describes the interior silence required for true listening:

“In order to listen, it is necessary to keep quiet. I do not mean merely a sort of constraint to be physically silent and not to interrupt what someone else is saying, but rather an interior silence, in other words, a silence that not only is directed toward receiving the other person’s words but also reflects a heart overflowing with a humble love, capable of full attention, friendly welcome and voluntary self-denial, and strong with the awareness of our poverty. The silence of listening is a form of attention, a gift of self to the other, and a mark of moral generosity.” (Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Power of Silence, 143)

Silence is an act of love, of receiving others and giving ourselves. We can give this gift to God, another person, and to ourself.

Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium, urges the same revolution of encounter and listening:

“the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction. True faith in the incarnate Son of God is inseparable from self-giving, from membership in the community, from service, from reconciliation with others. The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 88b)

Encounter demand vulnerability, an open receptiveness to the other’s choices and preferences. A willingness to experience their strong emotions and difficult experiences. This receptiveness can extend to Christ’s sacramental presence as the Eucharist. The Eucharist is always linked to His passion and death. As we approach Holy Week, we are all invited to this revolution of tenderness toward Christ in our repentance and in walking the way of the cross with Him liturgically through the Triduum.

Ultimately, silence prepares us for prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “in the silence of the spirit of adoption, we are enabled to share in the prayer of Jesus” (CCC, 2717). Silence that becomes solitude, full of God’s presence, is a supernatural encounter. In the desert with Christ, we learn to listen before we speak, to receive before we offer.

Modern life continues to find new ways to evade true silence. An example of this is the ubiquitous presence of headphones in public spaces. Walk through a grocery store or a park and you will see scores of people moving through places filled with people but wrapped in private sound. Many public spaces may be quieter today than they used to be, but each person has become inundated by isolated noise. The joyful ring of conversation has faded, and the attention of true presence has been banished by lonely sounds reverberating in the skull.

True solitude is open-hearted and connected. It is vulnerable quiet that makes room for God and for others. Isolation, by contrast, is closed and defensive. The fear of loneliness often drives us toward noise; we dread the moment when silence forces us to recognize who we have become and who others truly are. The remedy is deeper engagement. When we listen to a friend’s story, to the stirrings of conscience, or to the still small voice of the Lord, loneliness dissolves into communion.

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