Reading · Faith Encouraged

Have you ever had to hold a secret until the right time?

I remember how frustrating it was for me to keep a secret about a surprise birthday party for a dear friend. It was going to be the “big four oh,” and we had all decided that I would have to delay him until all the festivities were ready. We had planned an elaborate celebration. Let us just say it involved a convoluted journey and an unexpected guest. It was fun.

But I was absolutely on pins and needles, trying not to give away the surprise before the right time.

Timing is everything in life. How do we discern when the right time is to launch a project, propose marriage, change jobs, or do the hard work of brutal honesty with another? As with all discernment, it takes time, humility, and courage to get the timing right.

“He charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of man should have risen from the dead.”

Today is the day after the great Feast of the Transfiguration, and we continue to bask in the afterglow of this cosmic revelation. And one detail in today’s Gospel deserves our attention. The Lord instructs His three disciples not to tell anyone what they have witnessed until after the Resurrection.

Why would He command silence about something so wonderful? Why, indeed.

At that time, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved son; listen to him.” And suddenly, looking around they no longer saw any one with them but Jesus only. And as they were coming down the mountain he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of man should have risen from the dead.

This command for silence is the sober wisdom of maturity.

The Lord is giving the recipients of this awesome revelation the chance to actually process what they have experienced before they are responsible for conveying it to anyone else.

This contains everything we need to know about how genuine spiritual experience is meant to work in our own lives.

First, profound truths need time to sink deep into our hearts before we are ready to convey them to others.

Too often we talk about our experiences without giving them time to form us and sober us.

We rush to share, to post, to testify, before the experience has actually had the chance to do its deep work in us.

This is why many spiritual fathers encourage their spiritual children to be quiet about dreams, visions, or miraculous experiences. So the events themselves do not become the focus. Speaking too soon too often leads to spiritual pride, or even outright deception, because the unprocessed experience has not yet been tested and humbled by time.

We know the rest of these men’s stories. Despite the miracle they had just seen, St. Peter still denied the Lord. St. James and St. John so misunderstood the purpose of the Lord’s ministry that they asked to sit at His right and left in His coming Kingdom. And all three of them scattered when the Lord was arrested.

It needed time. It needed silence. It needed to be carried quietly until they were ready to bear its weight responsibly.

This is true for us as well. When something wonderful happens to us in our spiritual life, a moment of unexpected peace in prayer, an answered petition, a sudden clarity about something we have struggled with for years, the temptation is to immediately tell everyone. But the Fathers have wisdom for us here.

Practice silence for a bit. Let the moment of grace actually change you before you attempt to explain it to someone else.

Next, suffering is often the necessary preparation that allows us to rightly understand what we have already been shown.

The Lord knew that St. Peter, St. James, and St. John needed to pass through the coming suffering, the arrest, the crucifixion, the apparent failure of everything they had hoped for, before they could rightly appreciate what had happened to them on the mountain.

Without passing through that fire first, they would have gotten the Transfiguration all wrong.

They would have misunderstood its real purpose. They might have reduced it to a magic trick or a spectacle rather than receiving it as the revelation it actually was.

Real life has a way of distorting our spiritual experiences if we do not take the time to discipline our feelings and thoughts in light of what comes after. The mountaintop experience, however genuine, is not the whole picture. It needs the valley that follows to be properly understood.

This is humbling and important for those of us who have had genuine encounters with God in prayer, in the Liturgy, in moments of unexpected grace. We are often tempted to treat these moments as the finished story, when in fact they are often the beginning of a longer formation that will include difficulty, confusion, and even apparent failure before the full meaning becomes clear.

Finally, the language of heaven is silence, and this silence is not confusion but adoration too full for words.

St. Isaac the Syrian famously noted, "Silence is the language of the age to come.” (from his Ascetical Homilies)

This is not the silence of timidity or uncertainty. It is a full and profound silence in the face of a truth too large for words. Only adoration can encompass this kind of glory. Words, even good and true words, eventually run out. Silence is what remains when the soul has actually touched something real.

St. Peter, in his fear and bewilderment on the mountain, did not know what to say, so he offered to build booths. This is what we often do when confronted with genuine glory. We try to manage it, to contain it, to do something practical with it, because pure adoration feels too uncomfortable, too undefended, too much like losing control.

The discipline of silence, of holding a genuine spiritual experience quietly before God rather than immediately processing it into words for others, is itself a form of listening. It is the patience that allows the Holy Spirit to do His deepest work before we interrupt the process with our own need to explain, perform, or be validated.

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Today, the Church continues to celebrate the Afterfeast of the Transfiguration, extending the joy of yesterday’s great feast into the following days. We do not simply mark the Transfiguration and move on. We linger in it, allowing its hymns and its light to continue forming us in the days that follow.

This is itself a liturgical expression of exactly the wisdom in today’s Gospel. The Church does not rush past glorious revelations. She gives us an Afterfeast precisely so that the truth revealed has time to settle into our hearts, the way the Lord gave St. Peter, St. James, and St. John time before they were responsible for proclaiming what they had seen.

The pattern of Feast and Afterfeast, glory followed by lingering reflection, is the Church’s wisdom embedded in her very calendar. We are not meant to consume spiritual experiences quickly and move on to the next thing. We are meant to dwell in them, let them mature in us, and only then allow them to bear fruit in how we live and what we say to others.

Today, as we live in the afterglow of the Transfiguration, allow some time and some silence so that this wonder can do its deep work in the deepest parts of your heart.

Is there a recent spiritual experience, a moment of grace, an answered prayer, an unexpected peace, that you have been quick to explain or share before letting it actually change you? Consider holding it quietly for a while longer. Let it mature. Let the silence do its work.

Then pray simply:

“Lord Jesus Christ, give me the humility to be silent when silence is what is needed. Let the truths You reveal to me sink deep into my heart before I attempt to convey them to others, and let my own coming trials prepare me to rightly understand the glory I have already glimpsed.”

Being Orthodox on Purpose means practicing the discipline of holy silence, allowing genuine spiritual experiences the time they need to mature in us before we speak, so that we convey God’s great works with wisdom rather than spiritual pride!

The Language of Heaven Is Silence

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