— TinyTalesDaily (@tinytalesdaily.bsky.social) February 12, 2026 at 9:01 AM
I am, you anxious one.
Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness?
...And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time.”
— Rainer Marie Rilke
from Rilke's Book of Hours translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
I used to dive into the silence once a month at the Jesuit Center near Wernersville and perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, would offer to bring back a bit of the silence for friends. I have been thinking about how to package up silence recently. Or rather, contemplating how to open a space for stillness and silence for those who are seeking it. What would it look like to set up that sort of portal in the parish church for an hour? What could you give people to take home...if not in a jar, but a gift of a way of drawing that cloak of silence and stillness around themselves if only for a few minutes?
It is so tempting to try to push lots of advice in, but I keep returning to Abba Moses advice, "Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." Or to riff on Mary Vorse's advice to young writers (including Sinclair Lewis) “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”: to sit in prayer is simply to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. I don't want to constrain prayer.
As to the jars in the TinyTale, I am with Marty Laird OSA (Into the Silent Land) on the notion that contemplation will somehow erase the woundedness we experience. Opening that jar of permanent silence isn't necessarily going to hush the screams in the other jar she bought. Prayer is not snorting lines of euphoric peace, warns Fr. Laird.
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