What I know about classical music you can put in a thimble. Yet, for whatever reason, a few years ago I bought a copy of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3. I'm listening to it as I sit on the patio on a pleasant, warm day, savoring it with the neighbor's cat, who seems lulled by its graceful sounds.

There's an abundance of silence in Gorecki's work, reminds Robert Reilly, a silence which some might interpret as "nothing happens." Yet that is the plague of the Western, modern (and Post-modern) mind. According to Reilly,

During a trip to Washington, DC, in the early 1990s, Górecki was asked to comment on the phenomenal success of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, the Nonesuch recording of which sold more than 800,000 copies. Górecki responded, "Let’s be quiet." Perhaps that is [his] most urgent message [ ], "Be quiet." Or perhaps more biblically, "Be still." This stillness is not empty silence [ ]. It is a full, gestational silence that allows one, like Moses, to hear the remaining words: "And know that I am God.”

Well, a soaring soprano was enough for the cat. He left.

If I turn off the music, I have my own form of silence here, the ostensible silence of “nothing happening.” The rustle of a leaf-laden tree branch. The crescendo of daytime cicadas. The twittering songs of sparrows, bluebirds, and chickadees, and the mimicry of a mockingbird. Faraway, there is the distant hum of traffic, the winding out of a motorcycle. Above me a single-engine prop plane makes its buzzing descent. Yet in between that cacophony, there are interstices of silence. Like Gorecki.

Like the work of John Tavener and Arvo Part, the profound silence that permeates the work of Gorecki is not empty but pregnant with meaning. “Some of [his] compositions emerge from the very edge of audibility and remain barely above it," says Reilly, "conveying the impression that there is something in the silence that is now being revealed before once again slipping out of range. The deep underlying silence slowly surfaces and lets itself be heard. For those precious moments one hears what the silence has to say. When not used in this way, a grammar of silence is nonetheless employed that punctuates even the more extrovert and vociferous works. Moments of silence stand like sentinels, guarding the inner stillness from the violence of sounds that have not come out of the silence."

We all need such sentinels. It might be the silence of a William Carlos Williams poem that we need, a white space pregnant with expectation. It might be a silent sanctuary before a call to worship when scripture resounds. It might be the thoughtful pause before you respond to a rash word spoken or email sent. It might be the great empty satellite silence of space that only a few among us have experienced, before God in some time unknown reconciles all things and reconstitutes His universe. It might be the anticipatory stillness before a God who lets our urgent plea hang in the silence between heaven and earth, until faith buoys it upward.

"[F]aith for me is everything," Gorecki once said. "If I did not have that kind of support, I could not have passed the obstacles in my life.” It was faith that kept Henryk Gorecki during the communist oppression in his native Poland. It underlines the melancholy chorales of his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Faith girds his silences, carries his sound.

In his classic book, The Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster links silence and solitude, the latter a necessary counterpoint to community. “Without silence,” he says, “there is no solitude.” Pointing to the example of Jesus, who often left the crowds to go to a “lonely place,” he concludes that “we must seek out the recreating stillness of solitude if we want to be with others meaningfully.” Just as solitude doesn’t mean we are alone, silence doesn’t mean nothing is happening, Just as great declarations are being made from the silence of space (Ps. 19:1-4a), so profound declarations are being made in the small silences we cultivate.

A lawn mower has started, its sound ebbing and flowing as it moves behind a neighbor's house. Children laugh. A car door slams and my daughter backs away for her day, with a smile and a wave and words of endearment from an open window. Even the neighbor's cat returns, a winsome black smudge against the sky. And then, something near to silence descends again, and I think, “be still," Gorecki’s “let’s be quiet,” the anticipatory silence before the thunder of, "And know that I am God."