The power of silence lies in its emptiness. Silence is a receptive space. It creates a sacred void, an opening through which you can receive: truth, perspective, strength, healing, revelation. In silence, you transcend words and contact the wordless. You fill up with a peaceful knowing. Silence is not the same as prayer. Prayer is a way of directing your feelings and thoughts, focusing them and sending them toward a source. Silence is listening, receiving, being. One is trying to reach the source of communication with it; the other, silence, is allowing yourself to hear the source within yourself, to become one with it... In prayer, you are the sender; in silence, you are the receiver.
The unfathomable mystery of God is that God is a Lover who wants to be loved. God not only says: "You are my Beloved". God also asks: "Do you love me?" and offers us countless chances to say "Yes" to our inner truth. The spiritual life, thus understood, radically changes everything. Being born and growing up, leaving home and finding a career, being praised and being rejected, walking and resting, praying and playing, becoming ill and being healed -- yes, living and dying -- they all become expressions of that divine question: "Do you love me?" And at every point of the journey there is the choice to say "Yes" and the choice to say "No".