Posted on: 8th April 2025

Hampstead Heath overground station has a little garden you can walk round and even work in. It has a sign on the gate, ‘You should sit in nature for twenty minutes a day… unless you’re busy, when you should sit for an hour'. Whether it is in London or Leeds we can find these little green spaces, cracks where silence can register in our awareness.

In Lent we follow a 40-day spiritual pilgrimage in the footsteps of Jesus. One of the traditional practices that emerged from his wilderness experience was the contemplative practice of silence. Silence in nature is full of the presence of bird song, the wind in trees. This noise or music is calming. I have come back to the importance of silence because of recent articles in the news about how bad man-made noise is for us. The BBC ironically called it the silent killer.

When we do find a physical space where there is external silence, we soon realise how noisy our minds are. That’s why we often avoid silence, as afflictive thoughts and feelings can emerge knocking on the door of our attention. At some point, we need to turn and face them with Christ. We need to have something to do in the silence, which is why practices like slow meditative reading of scripture (lectio divina) are helpful. We can also find silence in our own lives in the cracks between activities- our first waking moment can be an opportunity to notice quiet and stillness, as can offering the moments before sleep in a night prayer.

Jesus invites us to step out of thinking into awareness when he asks us to ‘consider the lilies’ (Matthew 6:28). Consider is not a thinking word; it is about contemplating, being aware and attentive. When we step into this place of being like the psalmist who considered the night sky (psalm 8), we can have an epiphany; that God contemplating us, cares for us - this gives us hope in our uncertain world.

Into The Silent Land is a contemplative book by Martin Laird where he talks about our inner capacity for awareness as a spacious, silent space. Our God given capacity to observe the world from this non-elaborative awareness means we can be a witness of our afflictive thoughts (anger, sadness, pride, envy, lust, boredom) rather than a victim of them. It means that, like Jesus in the desert, we can respond wisely to temptation rather than react automatically to it.

Walking into that silent land may be the last great journey left to us all. But in that space, we may inhabit the kingdom that can bring about the healing of all creation.

By Rev Dr Shaun Labert, Scargill Movement