“For God alone my soul waits in silence” (Psalm 62:1).
“Listen carefully…with the ear of your heart” (Prologue, Rule of Saint Benedict).
Attachment. Compulsion. Addiction. Whatever you choose to call it, all are symptoms of the same spiritual disease. All are forms of a profoundly disordered love born of pride and the other cardinal sins. And all represent a clamorous “roar” of self-will run riot that tragically drowns out the “still small voice” of God so needful to be heard for conversion, freedom, and abundant life.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “Conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths” (1795). When we become enslaved to self-exaltation and self-gratification, when we substitute the Creator with the created in search of pleasure and personal fulfillment, we pollute the “secret core and sanctuary” of our hearts with the ruinous “noise” of self-centeredness that morally incapacitates us, rendering us spiritually deaf, dumb, and blind, as it were, and thus unable to discern the silent presence of God who is ever speaking and calling to us in the deepest recesses of our souls.
The Catechism goes on: “It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection” (1779). Indeed! A key feature of entering upon the path of recovery is learning the most necessary disciplines of quiet self-reflection (Steps 4 and 10) and prayerful interiority (Steps 5-7 and 11). We cannot “better do Thy will,” as the Third Step Prayer asks, if we do not eliminate the “noise pollution” of disordered self-love and self-preoccupation.
The Catholic Church has borne perpetual witness over the centuries to the necessity of practicing interior and exterior forms of silence as fundamental to a healthy spiritual life, and the very means by which we come to hear the voice of God in our lives, to be in relationship with Him in a vital way, and to grow in His grace and love. The communion of saints, the great “cloud of witnesses” who have gone before us, have shown us that living in the presence of God requires a certain and most definite silencing of our minds (selfish thoughts), of our hearts (selfish intentions), and of our bodies (selfish actions) so that He can shape us in His love and conform us to His will. In other words, so that we can be “reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever in the next” (Serenity Prayer).
Our Lord embraced silence in His earthly life when He frequently would go off to solitary places alone to pray and commune with the Father (cf. Matthew 14:23; Mark 1:35; Mark 6:46; Luke 5:16; Luke 6:12). Indeed, Jesus teaches us, “When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). He is signalling to us that the secluded space of our “room” is not just a physical location within our home, but also, and more importantly, it is the quiet interiority of the temple of our heart where God yearns to dwell with us and communicate His very divine life to us (cf. John 14:23; 1 Corinthians 3:16; 1 Corinthians 6:19; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 3:17).
We read the following from the wisdom of the Desert Fathers: “A hermit said, ‘Take care to be silent. Empty your mind. Attend to your meditation in the fear of God, whether you are resting or at work. If you do this, you will not fear the attacks of the demons’” (The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks).
Saint John Cassian, an early Church Father who had a major influence on Saint Benedict and the growth of western monasticism, taught, “We pray with the door closed when we pray with closed lips and total silence to the one who scrutinizes not words, but hearts” (Conferences).
Blessed Dom Columba Marmion OSB, renowned abbot and spiritual director, instructed, “Enter more and more into the great silence. Silence: (a) of the tongue; (b) of the movements of the passions; (c) of reasons and reflections on the manner in which others act. Leave that to our Heavenly Father…Then that becomes a prayer which makes peace and silence only the more profound” (With Christ: An Anthology of the Writings of Blessed Columba Marmion).
Saint Faustina, the great saint of Divine Mercy, wrote in her Diary, “In order to hear the voice of God, one has to have silence in one’s soul and to keep silence; not a gloomy silence, but an interior silence; that is to say, recollection in God. A talkative soul is empty inside. It lacks both the essential virtues and intimacy with God. A soul that has never tasted the sweetness of inner silence is a restless spirit which disturbs the silence of others” (118).
Pope Saint John Paul II beautifully expressed, “In an oasis of quiet…one can easily experience how profitable silence is, a good that today is ever more rare…In reality, only in silence does man succeed in hearing in the depth of his conscience the voice of God, which really makes him free. It is an indispensable interior dimension of human life” (Address, July 11, 2004).
His successor Pope Benedict XVI eloquently affirmed, “By withdrawing into silence and solitude, human beings, so to speak, ‘expose’ themselves to reality in their nakedness, to that apparent ‘void’…in order to experience instead Fullness, the presence of God, of the most real Reality that exists and that lies beyond the tangible dimension” (Vespers Homily, October 9, 2011).
And finally Robert Cardinal Sarah of Guinea, retired prelate of the Church, shared in an interview, “God speaks through his silence. The silence of God is a form of speech. His Word is solitude. The solitude of God is not an absence, it is his very being, his silent transcendence” (The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise).
What these myriad voices share in common is that the practice of silence is essential for a sound spiritual life and communion with God. Step 11 in recovery states, “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” The consistent message of the Church and her saints throughout the ages has been that we come “to improve our conscious contact with God” largely through a properly ordered silencing of our thoughts and actions, of our self-will, ambitions, judgments, and expectations, of our fears, anxieties, disbelief, and distrust, and of our incessant and prideful need to be in control. It is simply impossible to know God and to carry out His will if we do not learn how to shut up, listen, and, as the blessed Mother directed at the Wedding Feast of Cana, “Do whatever He tells you” (John 2:5).
A particularly helpful expression I have found for learning how to practice interior and exterior silence in my own recovery comes from the pithy insights of a little-known 19th-century French Carmelite nun and mystic named Sr. Marie-Aimée de Jésus OCD. She articulated twelve degrees of “holy silence” for a mature and sustained spiritual life. I am indebted to the marvelous book by Fr. Basil Nortz ORC, titled Holy Silence: A Practical Guide to Recollection in God. The book has much to offer us for conceiving of and living recovery as the embodiment of “holy silence.” My goal is to delve into each of the twelve degrees of holy silence, offer my own thoughts on how they relate to the Twelve Steps, and hopefully show how they can greatly enrich one’s journey of conversion in recovery.
The twelve degrees of holy silence are (1), Silence of Speech, (2) Silence of the Body, (3) Silence of the Senses, (4) Silence of the Imagination, (5) Silence of the Memory, (6) Silence of Interior Conversations, (7) Silence of the Heart, (8) Silence of Self-Love, (9) Silence of the Spirit, (10) Silence of Judgment, (11) Silence of the Will, and (12) The Silence of Union.
This series will continue with Part 2.
Pete S. is a grateful Catholic in recovery. He lives in Augusta, GA, and helped start a CIR General Recovery meeting at St. Teresa of Avila Catholic Church in Grovetown, GA, in 2022. He actively sponsors several individuals in CIR. He is also a regular content contributor for CIR. And as a result of his recovery journey in CIR, he discerned a calling to the Benedictine spiritual way of life, and on July 11, 2025 (the 4th anniversary of his sobriety date), he made final promises to become an Oblate of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA. He seeks to mold his recovery one day at a time after the Benedictine principles of obedience, stability, and conversion of life.