More than one reader of Parabola suggested that for our issue on Silence, we publish 128 blank pages. For what is there to say about silence that doesn’t violate it? Perhaps in the end, silence must be met with silence.

But we are in the middle of our journey, not at its end. Henriette Lannes, who studied with G. I. Gurdjieff, suggests in this Spring 2008 issue that “There is in us a zone where noise and tumult have no place, and a zone where everything reverberates.” We live in two worlds, one of silence and one of the vibrations that, as the Islamic teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan explains elsewhere in this issue, emanate from silence and give rise to all that exists, including ourselves and our many manifestations. Given our dual nature, there is much to say about silence.

In our opening essay, John Roger Barrie, a teacher of Vedanta, points out that “to the mystic, silence is the ground, the core of reality....The deeper elements in all religions point to this silence. It is God, it is Buddha; it is Allah.” And so in this issue we find contributions flowing from myriad spiritual traditions, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and Taoist among them. And while these traditions can and do clash on matters theological, moral, and practical, in approaching silence they sound a remarkably harmonic chord. A clear instance can be found in our interview with Father Robert Kennedy, a Jesuit priest who also serves as a roshi, or master, in the Zen Buddhist tradition, and who finds a fruitful approach to silence in both traditions.

Yet silence can be difficult, even fearsome, the sacred ways teach us. “For some people this silence or darkness must be endured so that they can have own voice, so that they can truly be themselves,” says Father Kennedy. And Islamic scholar David Sander writes in this issue of silence within the Qu’ranic tradition as muteness and dread, as the gateway to spiritual death.

Whatever our understanding and experience of silence, there is no escaping the world of sound, of vibrations that arise from it. Yet as Henriette Lannes advises, “After a moment of silence, we have a greater possibility of seeing the return of words in our thinking. Behind the words that form, the silence is still there, and for a few minutes we try not to lose entirely this contact with inner silence.” We inhabit two worlds. Perhaps our challenge is to awaken to them both—and to realize that they are truly one; that as Zen teaches, as expressed by Father Kennedy, “There is no ‘spiritual life.’ There’s just one life, with different aspects.”

Jeff Zaleski