Praise no one before he speaks, for it is then that people are tested. (Sirach 27:7)
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt of it. (Attributed to various sources)
These two quotes help us to appreciate the value of sometimes remaining quiet. Yet, we rarely value silence. We are thrilled when our children begin to speak and we celebrate our child’s first words. We are decidedly less enthusiastic about how well our children listen. This tends to be reversed when our children are teenagers. At that point, we would be ecstatic if they would argue less and listen more carefully.
Much of our prayer tends to be us talking to God, often seeking specific outcomes – a better job, a higher grade, a cure, etc. Sometimes, we are simply reading “standard” prayers with minimal attention to the substance. For me, this happens when I recite Morning or Evening prayer in a distracted way. When I catch myself mindlessly saying the words, I have to start over to even know what I was praying about.
Often when we pray, we are totally focused on speaking about ourselves. Yet, true prayer should not be a litany of all that we believe is good or bad. If prayer is a conversation with God, it has to be more meaningful than our mere listing of what we like and don’t like about our lives. We must allow time for God to speak. Of course, during prayer, the time that we are “listening” for God’s response is often filled with silence. That generally makes us uneasy and we feel compelled to once again begin babbling on about our problems, hopes and dreams.
If you went to visit a doctor, rambled on endlessly about your ailments, and then left the appointment without hearing a word from the doctor, your visit would not have been very productive. Yet, that is precisely how many of us engage in prayer with God. We recite rote prayers for some specified amount of time or some specified number of repetitions, but we never set aside time to simply be quiet. The next time that we pray, we may want to remember the excellent advice of Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.”
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