Silence is a dwelling place that is at once horizontal, allowing connection with the thisness, the singularity of everything, but it is also, at the same time, vertical. It allows us to find, through those things, doorways to the eternal. Silence takes away the noise we project onto everything and allows individual things to stand in, stand for, and even stand apart so that we can see the light and life that they reveal. This is always the doorway to that—and to more. The one is the window by which we can see the many. If it is true here, it soon becomes true everywhere.
—from the book Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation
by Richard Rohr, OFM
