“Silence has ever been, as it were, the luxury of great holiness. ... So it is the first life which He, the eternally silent spoken Word of the Father, chooses for Himself. All His afterlife was colored by it. In His childhood, He let speech seem to come slowly to Him, as if He were acquiring it like others, so that under this disguise He might prolong His silence, delaying thus even his colloquies with Mary. Mary also herself, and Joseph, caught from Him, as by a heavenly contagion, a beautiful taciturnity. In His eighteen years of hidden life, silence still prevailed in the holy house of Nazareth. Words, infrequent and brief, trembled in the air, like music which was too sweet for one strain to efface another, while the first still vibrated in the listening ear.
In the three years’ ministry, which was given up to talking and teaching, He spoke as a silent man would speak, or like a God making revelations. Then, in His Passion, when He had to teach by His beautiful way of suffering, silence came back again, just as an old habit returns at death, and became once more a characteristic feature of His life.”
~Frederick Faber
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