A Book of Silence
by Sarah Maitland, paperback, 2010.


One of the consolations of spending time at home during this Eastertide is the opportunity to see things in the yard or garden bloom and grow. I have not yet graduated to that exclusive circle of enthusiasts who speak to their plants, but the older I get the more pleasure I take in planting things. There is something especially meditative and spiritually strengthening in a garden—-whether it be in a suburban backyard, in a local park or on the grounds of a parish church.

Silence and nature create the perfect atmosphere for prayer and contemplation. Yet our divine Creator is always at work in the midst and at the center of the silence. Sarah Maitland, a writer and Christian essayist, grew up in a noisy household of six children. In her late forties, divorced, she found herself living alone in the country and discovering the beauty of silence. She loved the silence so much that she built a hermitage on an isolated moor in Scotland.

Out of Maitland’s love of silence came a beautiful book, A Book of Silence . In it she writes of the ‘sound’ and energy of silence in the wideness of the cosmos and in the backyard vegetable or flower garden. Of the cosmos:

In our noise-obsessed culture it is very easy to forget just how many of the major physical forces on which we depend are silent – gravity, electricity, light, tides, the unseen and unheard spinning of the whole cosmos. The earth spins, it spins fast. It spins about its own axis at about 1,700 kilometers per hour (at the Equator); it orbits the sun at 107,218 kilometers per hour. And the whole solar system spins through the spinning galaxy at speeds I hardly dare to think about. The earth's atmosphere spins with it, which is why we do not feel it spinning. It all happens silently.

But she writes most beautifully about the teaming energy of growth in a garden, all so very silent.