Silence After Prayer

The words are done. And now there is only this.

Whatever was said has been released into the silence. Petition or gratitude. Grief spoken aloud or in the chest. A name given to the darkness. An honesty that could not be said to another person and was said instead to whatever receives such things.

The saying is over. And the silence that follows is different from the silence before. The silence before is waiting. The silence after is received.

Not because an answer has arrived. It usually has not, at least not yet, not in language. But the quality of the silence after prayer is not the quality of the silence before. It has been filled by the offering and is now holding it. Something has been given and the giving changes things. Not dramatically. By the margin of having spoken.

There is something physiological here that exists alongside whatever else is happening. The act of articulating a need, even to silence, even to the dark ceiling, changes the need slightly. What is said becomes a little less locked in the body. A little more external. You can look at it from slightly further away.

Therapists and priests and late-night friends on telephones know this. The thing said aloud is a different shape than the thing held inside. Usually smaller. Usually less absolute.

Stay in the silence after. Do not rush to the next thing. The silence after is not empty. It is doing something you cannot fully observe from where you are sitting. Something that requires your non-interference to proceed.

If you are a person who prays, you know this silence. You have been in it many times. The quality is familiar. The landing after words. The slight shift in the room, or in yourself, that follows the practice of opening.

If you are not a person who prays, this stillness is available in other forms. The silence after a conversation that mattered. After music that reached you. After a cry that has been held back for days and finally released. The body offers these silences because the body knows their value.

There is a practice in many traditions of listening after speaking. The formal name for it changes by tradition: receptive prayer, contemplative waiting, sitting in the presence. The distinction between this and simply sitting in silence is subtle but real. This silence has been preceded by an opening, by the act of addressing, which changes the quality of what follows. A conversation has begun, even if only one voice has spoken. There is a courteous quality to waiting after addressing something: the sense that having offered something, you are now available to receive whatever response comes, in whatever form it takes. Including, sometimes, a silence that is itself the response. Not the absence of an answer. The answer itself.

Rest in it. Whatever the name for what you do. Rest in the quiet that follows the speaking. In the moment after giving something difficult to the keeping of whatever holds such things.

You do not need to resolve anything right now. The resolution, if it comes, will come in its own time, in its own form, unannounced. This silence is not the waiting for it. It is the release of the need for it.

The words are done. Let them go. Let the silence do the rest.

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