In the silence of our prayerful hearts, we stand empty and are so able to hear God knocking at the door and longing to come inside. Too many words insulate us from our inner poverty. Too many words drown out the sound of God's voice at the door.
In a sense great music exists for the sake of its pauses; for instance, the pauses that occur in the middle of a Beethoven symphony. These pauses are of course quite unlike bits of ordinary silence, because the whole symphony has led up to them — they are held and defined, and the music goes on the other side of them. Such pauses are silence charged with meaning. Music transcends music by producing charged silence.