The Silence Of Love

Have you ever been loved so deeply, intimately, that silence is the only response?  Friendship, love-making and prayer have this phenomenon in common.  There is the time in friendship when two people talk a lot to one another.  They are revealing layers of themselves in words.  Beginners in prayer are full of words.  Love-making, early on, can be full of words too, as you might see in the movies.  Taking care of the dying can have lots of words in the beginning as you talk about ailments, pain, and needs.  But as relationships deepen, so does the silent times.  Two people walk down the street who are falling in love and they might be very animated with one another, talking, listening, expressing happiness in words and gestures.  They pass an older couple sitting on a park bench who say nothing to one another, so deep is the love.  For Christians, Jesus on the Cross, or in the Garden of Gethsemene before his Passion and death, seem to hear nothing.  Is God away? Sleeping? Uncaring? Non-existent? No, the God silence is the expression of deep love, the deepest yearning that so few people experience.  God's deepest love for us, if we can accept it, is silence.  It is God's language when God is allowed to be just God, deeply loved by a human being.  As the dying person gets closer to passing on, the care-giver lover, simply sits with them and is silent.  Usually, the dying person is silent too when they experience the deep loving compassion of the care-giver.  When someone gives you the "silent treatment" that is a form of resentment or manipulation, or punishment.  The silence of  deep love is none of that.  Lovers, mystics know this.