We all know the dangers of too much noise, the dissipating distraction of too much chatter. Yet not all silence is good. There is a painful silence when a conversation has died because no one knows what to say. Even worse is the silence that follows a quarrel. But of course, silence can also be delightful. I like to think of heaven as sitting silently with the Trinity, simply enjoying the presence of the Three.

Silence and happiness are not too far apart. The spiritual writer Jean Corbon, the principal author of the fourth part of the Catechism, which is about prayer, observes that “the quality of the love shared between two people can almost be judged by the quality of their shared silence” (Path to Freedom, 88). Don’t we all yearn for a deeper and deeper silence?

To pursue it, however, we must first know what it is. What distinguishes between the silence that allows us to breathe and the silence that suffocates us?

I propose that silence is life-giving when it is joyful. Without joy, silence quickly leads to restlessness and loneliness. According to St. Thomas, joy has two elements: both having a good and being aware of having it (ST I-II.31.1). For most of us a lack of joy doesn’t come from a lack of goods. There are always good things to enjoy such as friendship, the gift of existence, and the presence of God, even if they are invisible. Rather, our joy is often limited by being unaware of the goods around us. How do we remedy this?

The solution is thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is potent, precisely because it enables us to become more and more aware of the goods that we possess. When we use our voice to give thanks, we do not destroy silence but augment and perfect it. The French philosopher Jean-Louis Chretien makes this same point when he says that “the silence after speech is never the same as the silence that preceded it: it ripens and grows within all the words that ultimately come to offer themselves to it and in it” (The Ark of Speech, 41). By transforming a sterile silence into a living silence, thanksgiving results in a newfound abundant joy in the things that we already possess.

So, if you want to improve the quality of your relationships with your loved ones and with God, give thanks. Search diligently for the ways in which they are good and do good. Thank them with your voice and then enjoy the joyful silence that is a foretaste of the eternal silence in the world that is to come.

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Republished with gracious permission from Dominicana (February 2025). 

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Image: Georges de La Tour, The New-born