The Invitations of Mary Series
©MS 2026

When I think about silence, I think about the absence of noise.

No television humming in another room.

No phone vibrating against a table.

No air conditioner clicking on. (Or in my case in the Texas Summer

No traffic outside.

No notification demanding to be noticed.

But Mary would not have known silence that way.

Her world was quieter than ours, certainly.

But it was not empty.

There would have been wind.

Birds.

Animals shifting in their stalls.

Water poured into clay jars.

Sandals against stone.

Someone grinding grain.

A neighbor calling from across the road.

Children arguing.

Wood being cut.

Bread being kneaded.

The murmur of prayer.

The sounds of people living close enough to hear one another.

Maybe silence, for Mary, was not the absence of sound.

Maybe it was the absence of interruption.

There was no machine waiting to summon her attention from across the room.

No glowing rectangle carrying a thousand strangers into her home.

No endless stream of voices explaining what she should fear, buy, believe, become, or be angry about.

When she walked somewhere, she walked there.

When she drew water, she drew water.

When she sat beside Joseph, there was nowhere else demanding that a part of her mind remain.

That does not mean her life was peaceful.

Silence and peace are not the same thing.

A quiet room can hold terror.

A quiet road can feel lonely.

A quiet night can make grief louder.

Mary knew that kind of silence too.

There was the silence after Gabriel left.

The silence before Joseph understood.

The silence of a sleeping child she had been told would change the world.

The silence after Simeon spoke of a sword.

The silence between losing Jesus and finding him.

And eventually, the terrible silence of Holy Saturday.

Perhaps Mary understood something we have almost forgotten:

Silence does not always comfort.

Sometimes it reveals.

Without constant noise, there is nowhere for certain thoughts to hide.

What are you afraid of?

What are you grieving?

What do you want?

What is God asking?

What have you been refusing to hear?

Maybe that is why silence feels so uncomfortable to us now.

We can escape it almost instantly.

Mary could not.

She lived in a world where waiting remained waiting.

A journey took as long as the road required.

Night was dark.

News traveled slowly.

Questions sometimes remained unanswered.

Prayer did not compete with a screen.

And perhaps that made silence less of a special spiritual practice and more of an ordinary condition of being alive.

I wonder what Mary would think of the way we search for silence now.

We buy noise-canceling headphones.

We download meditation apps.

We schedule retreats so someone can give us permission not to answer our phones.

We travel somewhere remote to rediscover something that once arrived every evening with the setting sun.

Maybe Mary would not recognize our definition of silence at all.

Maybe she would listen to our homes—the refrigerators, fans, televisions, traffic, alerts, appliances, music, podcasts, voices—and understand immediately why we struggle to hear anything beneath them.

Or maybe she would smile and tell us that Nazareth was never truly silent either.

Because silence was never about hearing nothing.

It was about making enough room to notice what was already there.