Silence is a Form of Welcome

From the series: Making Space at the Table: The Slow, Holy Work

“For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him.”
—Psalm 62:5 (NRSV)

Noise has become the default condition of the world—and often, of the Church. From the drone of Sunday notices to the pressure to speak in every small group setting, we’ve learned to equate participation with words. Silence, in contrast, can feel threatening, awkward, even a sign that something has gone wrong.

But in Scripture and in liturgical tradition, silence is not failure. It is presence. It is reverence. And it is, crucially, a form of welcome.

The slow, holy work of making space at the table requires more than extending an invitation. It requires creating an environment in which every person’s way of being is not just permitted, but honoured. And for many—especially the neurodivergent, the anxious, the grieving, the contemplative—silence is not absence. It is sanctuary.

In the Gospel of Luke, we are told that Mary “pondered these things in her heart” (Luke 2:19). There is no record of what she said at the Nativity. Her welcome of the Word made flesh was not a spoken declaration, but a deep, interior openness. Mary becomes, in the tradition of Christian spirituality, the image of the Church as receptive, listening, still.

Silence can be that kind of welcome. It is not a blank space to be filled—it is a vessel. When we allow silence to breathe in our liturgies, our pastoral care, and our community life, we make room for the presence of those who process more slowly, who speak less frequently, or who speak not at all.

In The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen writes that the task of ministry is not to fill silence with answers, but to create safe places where people can find the courage to enter their own depths.¹ Silence is the sacred permission to be present without performance.

Many people have been taught—implicitly or explicitly—that to be a "good Christian" is to speak easily and confidently about God. But Scripture honours the mute, the wordless, the ones who come in quiet desperation. The woman who reaches out to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment does not say a word—and yet she is heard, seen, healed.

In the Benedictine tradition, silence is not passive. It is active listening. It allows us to hear not only one another, but God. The Rule of St Benedict treats silence not as a withdrawal, but as a condition for love: “If we do not speak, we will listen; and if we listen, we will love.”²

To make space at the table for those who do not speak much—or at all—is to acknowledge that communion is not primarily verbal. It is bodily. It is shared presence. It is the grace of sitting together in the presence of God.

Some of the most profound acts of welcome occur without words: a shared meal, a nod across the room, a held hand, a space on the pew left intentionally unfilled. This is the language of silence, and it speaks volumes.

Many neurodivergent, queer and disabled people experience Church as a place where they are constantly asked to conform to a particular rhythm of interaction—fast, fluent, emotionally expressive. They are invited to the table, but expected to show up in ways that align with neurotypical or able-bodied norms.

But what if the Church recognised silence as a gift?

What if we stopped measuring faith by how much someone talks in a group or how confidently they sing? What if we stopped interpreting silence as spiritual disengagement? What if we remembered that Jesus often retreated to the mountains—not to teach or to preach, but to be with the Father?

To make space in silence is to say: You don’t have to prove anything to belong here.

The Eucharist itself contains moments of silence—at the confession, the intercessions, the elevation. These are not accidental pauses. They are built-in spaces for reverence, reflection, and awe. They are cracks in the structure through which mystery seeps in.

But often, we rush them. We treat them as transitional dead space. We’re uncomfortable with the lack of control silence implies. And yet, in that discomfort lies the opportunity for deep welcome.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Divine Liturgy is often surrounded by moments of profound stillness—no microphones, no stage directions. In Quaker worship, the silence is the centre. In Taizé, the repeated chants give way to long stretches of wordless prayer. These traditions know what many modern churches forget: that silence is participation. Silence is praise.

To embrace silence as a form of welcome is to re-learn how to listen—to one another and to God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us in Life Together that "the first service one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them."³ Not fixing. Not explaining. Not outperforming. Listening.

This includes the kind of listening that doesn’t always rely on words. Listening to posture. Listening to absence. Listening to the Spirit moving in ways we don’t fully understand.

If we want to make space for everyone at the table, we must stop assuming everyone must sound the same—or sound at all. We must learn to welcome the God who speaks in silence, and the person whose silence is not a problem to fix, but a presence to honour.

In that stillness, we may find ourselves hearing God again.
And perhaps, in making room for silence, we finally begin to make space for one another.

References

1. Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, Image Books, 1979.

2. The Rule of St Benedict, Prologue and Chapter 6: “Restraint of Speech.”

3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Harper & Row, 1954.