Delphic Maxim 36: Be (religiously) silent

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

36. Be (religiously) silent

I can understand why silence is in these maxims — we spend so many of our days making senseless noise (at least I do), and its a rare thing to get a moment’s silence. Then to layer into that religious silence, well, that’s a whole extra degree of difficulty and discomfort!

Or is it? Today I chose to sit on the balcony again, because there’s a morning mist over Sydney and the air is suffused with a soft pinky-purple haze. Throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer refers to ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ rising in the east, and it’s days like this that you can see why. It is also a deeply silent experience — there’s the gentle distant hum of traffic, soundless planes gliding over the city, if you strain your ears and it’s early enough in the morning you can hear the ocean.

So much for silence!

Actually, the sounds of the world are peaceful and lovely to hear this early in the morning, and only being silent myself do I get a chance to hear them like this. In a sense, I suppose, this is a religious experience — or perhaps religion’s gentler parent spirituality.

Silence is a widely-used spiritual practice. It’s a core element of Eastern religions — Tao, Zen, Confucianism and so on. You find silence in religious spaces in the Abrahamic traditions as well — you only need to spend time in the crypts under St Peter’s Basilica to feel the reverence and peace associated with (religious) silence.

More recently, of course, the psychology of mindfulness draws on silence in its practices. Quieting yourself in order to listen to thoughts, to attend to spaces you are in, to soak up the richness and audible texture of the environment around you — these practices are enabled through silence. Silence is good for you! At least it is in the sense that any kind of ritual performed regularly seems to have benefits for our physical and mental health.

So today’s maxim I think is about integrating silence into our daily lives. A chance to be quiet and to reflect. To wake up of a morning, to take some time rather than to rush into the grind, and to look out — wherever you can — as dawn’s rosy fingers extend over the world.

Silence, like the rising sun, is golden.