Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world. . . . Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence is a great friend of the soul; it unveils the riches of solitude. It is very difficult to reach that quality of inner silence. You must make a space for it so that it may begin to work for you. In a certain sense, you do not need the whole armory and vocabulary of therapies, psychologies, or spiritual programs. If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you. These are some wonderful lines from the French poet Rene Char: "Intensity is silent, its image is not. I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me." Here is an image of silence as the force that discloses hidden depth. Silence is the sister of the divine.
We die to many parts of ourselves, and the quality of each of these dying processes determiners the vitality of each rebith. It seem sto me that between heaven and earth there is just the slightest, most permeable membrane, and dthat it is possible to live in both realms simultaneously, at least some of the time. The conjunction of the two dimensions that we so loosely call death and birth is equally permeable. Each courageous end is also the finest and most pure beginning. To journey into that great unknown is the human-making pilgrimage, a gradual return to the image and likeness of God.