Lady of Silence

Mother of silence and Humility, you live as one lost and found in the bottomless sea of the Mystery of the Lord.

You are availability and receptivity. You are fecundity and plenitude. You are attentiveness and solicitousness towards all. You are vested with power.

In you shines forth merciful maturity and spiritual elegance. You are a lady in your own right before being Our Lady.

There is no dispersal in you. In one simple and total act your soul is fixed and identified with the Lord. You are in God, and God is in you.

The Complete Divine Mystery envelops you and penetrates you, and dwells in you, and occupies and integrates your whole being.

It seems as if all is motionless in you, all identified with you: time, space, word, music, and the silence of a woman, and God. Everything remains assimilated in you and divinized.

No one has ever seen such sweetness, nor will a woman so enchanting ever be seen again.

Nevertheless, your silence is not absence but presence. You are immersed in the Lord and, at the same time attentive to your brothers as in Cana. Never is communication so profound as when nothing is said, and never is silence so eloquent as when nothing is communicated.

Make us understand that silence is not a disinterest in others but a fountain of energy and radiance; it is not a retreat but a charge; and that to share riches, one must accumulate them.

The world is drowning in a sea of dispersion, and it becomes impossible to love our brothers and sisters with a distracted heart.

Make us understand that the apostolate, without silence, is alienation; and that silence without the apostolate is a mere comfort.

Enfold us in your mantel of silence, and imbue us with the fortress of your faith, the height of your Hope and the depth of your Love.

Stay with those of us who remain and come with those of us who depart.

Oh, admirable Mother of Silence!

From the Book “The silence of Mary” by Father Ignacio Larrañaga