When Love Is Quiet
By Rachael Gieger
I’m a pretty loud person. My sister has been really good about pointing this out to me in a way that only a sibling can--when my voice carries to a slightly overwhelming decibel, she says: “Rachael, why are you talking so loud? I’m sitting right next to you.” (If you’re reading this, Sissy, sorry to throw you under the bus.) I’m particularly loud when I’m talking about something I love --words and connections seem to flow out of me. I know, at times, I’ve been able to speak both loudly and eloquently about the good, true, and beautiful. So naturally, I thought that the more I loved our Lord, and when I fell in love and my heart started to move towards its home, I would be as loud and eloquent as possible --perfectly articulating my every sentiment, soliloquies on love flowing from me constantly.
But love... love has made me so very quiet. And it has felt so very quiet. But it’s here I find my point--we cannot, in the modern age of noise and busyness and endless distraction, mistake quietness for nothingness. They are not the same. Quite the opposite, in fact. Silence has long connoted not nothingness, but somethingness. Presence--and presence beyond words. It’s not the moments that we can perfectly articulate during or afterwards that mean the most to us, despite what the movies might tell us. It’s the moments where love has left
us silent, where we feel the inadequacy of our own word and thought. But in our humanity, fed by the movement of such a noisy, hyper-emotional culture, we link love to the explosion of word and feeling.
But love, if it is deep, cannot be constantly touched by words, or sometimes even by feeling. Yes, we can pen love letters and say quite beautiful things, and feel them too. For Him, for each other--but it’s not those moments, not that kind of love, that carries us Home. It’s the silent kind, that quietly pierces you and takes you up into itself, that enraptures you in a gentle but endlessly deep mystery--this is the love that sustains our very life. Think of Love Himself,
nailed to a Cross in the most incredibly romantic gesture of all time--He said so very, very little. Nothing that could’ve been said would suffice. He chose an act that demanded silence, and so our experiences of love might tend to demand the same.
The more we press into that mystery, the one that can only be contemplated in silence, the more we realize that the most piercing of loves are not the loudest. Moments of speech and deed and feeling and passion and bliss come and go, and they are beautiful when they do--but they point to a deeper reality: that true love demands our silence. It demands us to leave ourselves behind and press into it, to let it show itself to us--not for us to categorize and
articulate it.
Love doesn’t necessarily make you constantly feel dripping with excitement and passion--whether with Him or with him. When things feel quiet, we’re tempted to doubt--is the love real, or have we lost it?--but don’t. Quietness, silence, is not nothingness. It shows there’s something--Someone--there beyond you and what you think and feel. It demands that you admit maybe you’re wrong, maybe His thoughts are higher than yours, maybe you have so much more to learn.
The words and passion will come when they need to, but only a quiet heart can know when those words come from Him rather than herself. There’s a reason why the woman who loved Him best was a quiet ponderer, and not a preacher--she knew the reverence of love. As Cardinal Sarah simply says in The Power of Silence: “Love is always humble, silent, contemplative, and on its knees before the beloved.”
Sister, whether it’s with Him or with him--don’t be afraid of a quiet love, one that humbles you and demands your reverent silence. Words and feelings will come and go time and time again throughout the span of a life... but the Love that calls us beyond ourselves, out of the realm of word and thought, will never, ever leave us alone.
