One of the little lessons I remember from my years of taking private lessons to play the alto saxophone is that music comprises both sound and silence. In many ways, the silence provides the setting, the foundation, from which the melodies and harmonies arise and take their shape in our ears’ memories. The famous opening theme from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, for example, repeats at the beginning of the first movement, but between the two statements of the theme lies a rest, when none of the instruments in the orchestra plays. This brief—but essential—silence helps to make the power and grandeur of that theme all the more eloquent. This is why my teacher said that a rest was “timed silence.” I take that to mean that the silence is deliberate.

It seems that a reading of “No One is to Speak after Compline,” Chapter 42 in The Rule of Benedict, leads me to a similar appreciation for the role of silence in monastic living, and so too, for the place of silence in my life, as I seek to live according to the spirit of this Rule. Saint Benedict begins by writing, “Monks ought to strive for silence at all times, but especially during the night hours” (RB 42:1). I appreciate his use of the phrase “to strive” (studere), because, as a commentator notes, it “implies that they will not always succeed” (Terrence G. Kardong, Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary, p. 345.). So this is yet another time when the Rule strives (successfully!) for a reasonable and attainable approach to holy living.

This time of “striv[ing] for silence” comes as a pause, a rest, at the end of the day, a day that has been punctuated by the praying of the Liturgy of the Hours. So if one looks at the mix of sound and silence, the composition of the day’s music reveals itself. There is a time to speak and a time to listen.

Most everyone who knows me knows I am a big fan of Apple Inc. and its products. I have owned an iPod for a number of years and thoroughly enjoy its amazing ability to pack enough music into a little box in my pocket that I could listen for 45 days without hearing the same song twice. So it would be no surprise to note that I used to listen to music on my iPod while I worked in the yard. But this spring, as I have spent time planting flowers and grasses and shrubs and plucking up weeds, I have not broken out my iPod. Instead, I have let this time outdoors be a time of silence, a rest from the sounds I might choose to fill my ears, and a time to listen to nature’s improvisations and to attune myself to the rhythms of my own thoughts as they arise in my mind’s ear.

Or perhaps I should have used the phrase “ear of my heart.” After all, in the first sentence his Rule, Saint Benedict’s writes obliquely of silence, “Listen, O my son, to the teachings of your master, and turn to them with the ear of your heart” (RB Prol. 1).

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.