Silence has become God’s final defense against our idolatry.  By limiting our speech, God gets some relief from our descriptive assaults.  By hiding within a veil of glory, God eludes our projections.  God deflects our attempts at control by withdrawing into silence, knowing that nothing gets to us like the failure of our speech.  When we run out of words, then and perhaps only then can God be God.  When we have eaten our own words until we are sick of them, when nothing we can tell ourselves makes a dent in our hunger, when we are prepared to surrender the very Word that brought us into being in hopes of hearing it spoken again – then, at last, we are ready to worship God.

Barbara Brown Taylor