To pray silence

(Beautiful photo with silence as theme - taken by Gaute Bruvik)


Prayer, we sometimes say is not about our needs as it is about praising God. And adoration of God is indeed an important part of the spiritual journey. To worship God in awe and gratitude can be a mystical experience in itself. When God touches us, praise comes up spontaneously from our innermost being. We marvel that we are given the grace of a divine touch. Words stream from us to express our joy at the mystical, special moment of the divine touch.

As we sing out the joy of having met God, it brings us even closer to God. We express our mystical experience and in our expression we deepen that experience. To worship God, is to enrich our mystical experience. We utter our words and speak out our feelings, but ultimately God takes our words, our expressions, our feelings and our experiences and uses it, sanctifies it. We worship and praise God because we were touched by God. But then, in abundant grace, God touches us in and through our worship. As we express from our side, our response to the mystical touch of God, we are touched anew.

All this makes our prayers of worship special. We do not speak about ourselves and our needs. We adore God and focus on the divine praise. And we get to understand that even if we are praising God, our words are sanctified, or experiences deepened. We worship God because of the divine touch, but then – in abundant grace, we realise with awe that in our worship God is touching us again.

It is enough to make us quiet. Often we arrive at a point that we understand how special our relationship with God is, how extraordinary our worship of the divine. It transcends our words. We cannot find language to express our experience. We fall silent, we run out of words. We merely want to be with God.

Which makes me think of Psalm 131.


1My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. 2 But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. 3 O Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore” (NIV).


What a remarkable Psalm: it is short, scarcely 30 words long. It is as if the author wants to speak the minimum of words. He has not much to say. Praying to God, the author speaks of his simplicity and humility. The simplicity is then linked with his quietness, his silence. This silence is so special that he uses an image to express it: he is like a baby, happy, contented, quiet and silent. It is a prayer about not praying words, not saying big, vain things.


And then the overwhelming end of the Psalm: to hope on God is literally to “wait on God.” Many translations render this verse as “hoping.” But in the light of the preceding verses, it should be seen as “waiting,” In this Psalm the author says: My words have come to an end. I only want to pray about having fallen silent. I want to pray about abandoning all the noise in life, of letting go the “important” things. I am praying silently in silence.