Defending Silence

I often find myself needing or wanting to defend silence and solitude. The world seems to think silence and solitude are so worthless; or that solitaries are insane. It is so ego to feel like I need to explain what is valuable about being alone and focusing all attention on God.

Here is a few touching phrases on silence from A Course in Miracles text (28.I): "The miracle comes quietly into the mind that stops an instant and is still. It reaches gently from that quiet time, and from the mind it healed in quiet then, to other minds to share its quietness. And they will join in doing nothing to prevent its radiant extension back into the Mind Which caused all minds to be. Born out of sharing, there can be no pause in time to cause the miracle delay in hastening to all unquiet minds, and bringing them an instant’s stillness, when the memory of God returns to them. Their own remembering is quiet now, and what has come to take its place will not be wholly unremembered afterwards...He to Whom time is given offers thanks for every quiet instant given Him. For in that instant is God’s memory allowed to offer all its treasures to the Son of God, for whom they have been kept. ....The instant’s silence that His Son accepts gives welcome to eternity and Him, and lets Them enter where They would abide. For in that instant does the Son of God do nothing that would make himself afraid...The trumpets of eternity resound throughout the stillness, yet disturb it not. And what is now remembered is not fear, but rather is the Cause that fear was made to render unremembered and undone. The stillness speaks in gentle sounds of love the Son of God remembers from before his own remembering came in between the present and the past, to shut them out."

To remember God by using your memory to remember Him instead of all the other worldy clutter is part of what The Course teaches. Practicing this skill is done in silence.

As my time studying ACIM lengthens, my hatred of others lessens. What a relief.