The Silence of Heaven

As a mother of five, I have spent many nights sitting in the hallway outside a bedroom door, listening to the angry, frustrated, or sorrowful noises of a child who does not want to go to sleep. Normally, that child has no idea how close I am or that I can hear him or her. In the child’s mind, I am probably having fun, not including them in the great time we could all be having if I only relented and cancelled this unreasonable and unwelcome bedtime. But instead, I often sit in the hallway just outside their door, listening.

I have reflected before about how I imagine God the Father sitting quietly outside the bedroom door of our hearts, silently attending to our troubles. We might think of His silence as absent and uncaring. Meanwhile, He sits near us, deeply aware of our sorrow but allowing and directing all for our ultimate good.

Sometimes, however, a wise parent realizes that we need more than silent wisdom to aid us in our difficulties. My kids sometimes get a nighttime scolding for poor behavior; other times, they get a message of encouragement and perspective. Sometimes, I just come in to sit next to them. Nothing about the perceived unfairness of bedtime changes, but I am now on their side of the door, letting them know—silently—that I care.

On a rainy night in August 1879, our Heavenly mother came on our side of the door. Other visits, such as Lourdes, Fatima, and Guadalupe, are famous for the messages she delivered and the massive public miracles she worked. But at Knock, Ireland, where people were suffering from famine and social upheaval, she came to sit quietly beside her children for an evening. Nothing too impressive happened. No words were spoken. There were some healings associated with the apparition, but nothing like a dancing sun or miraculous waters occurred.

In The Lamb of God: The Story of Our Lady of Knock, Patrick O’Hearn and Fr. Donald Calloway have brought the story of Our Lady of Knock to life for children, complete with lovely watercolor illustrations by Ann Kissane Engelhart. Patrick mentioned to me that the authors struggled at first to find a publisher interested in the book because, well, not much happens. The visionaries were folk so ordinary that many of them disappeared into history, swallowed up in the great Irish migration to New York and Chicago. The apparition itself was so quiet that, at first, some of the visionaries assumed that the shining white figures outside the church were new statues!

But as I read the book to my kids, it struck me that Our Lady of Knock is an incredibly important story, especially for little kids, and especially now. Silence is both scarce and scorned in modern society, especially where kids are involved. Not only are children not typically taught to value silence but they are not given the chance to experience silence as a positive thing. Children’s programming is a cacophony of noise and messaging. Children, it is often assumed, need constant stimulation and distraction in order to be engaged.

The tiresome mantra “silence is violence” is still drilled into young heads. We live in a world where more than half of generation alpha (my children’s generation—toddlers and middle schoolers) daydream of being influencers and activists, adding their voices and their “platforms” to the general din of social media, unsure yet even of what they want to end up saying.

Children also struggle with the silence of God when bad things happen, and adults often fail to find words that can meaningfully help the nagging sense of being ignored by Heaven. This is the beauty of Our Lady of Knock’s silence. Her silence is the silence of a mother who cares, who will come and sit with her children in the midst of their hardships. In the battering rain, against the wall of the church, Our Lady, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, and an altar with the Lamb of God upon it stood in shining light for one evening, on our side of the door. But the quiet message of Knock is that God and His saints are still with us, even when they are sitting just on the other side of the door.

For me as an adult, one of the best parts of The Lamb of God: The Story of Our Lady of Knock, is at the end. After the story and the illustrations end, the authors include an appendix which tracks what happened to the gaggle of villagers who were blessed by Our Lady’s presence. Life was not easy for them before or after the apparition. Some—even a few of the children—died soon after. Others were forced by the famine to flee to America, where they died and were buried in the unmarked graves of the poor. None of them have been singled out as saints in the making—probably because they were so ordinary that there is nothing about their lives to investigate, except for that one glorious evening in the driving rain.

As the authors write toward the end of the book, “Jesus might not take away every famine or difficulty in this life, but He is always with us in our struggles and so is His Mother.” Beautifully, the book points children back to Christ’s constant presence in the Eucharist. The final message of the story of Knock is one of silent hope, a hope we can claim for ourselves in the silence of our own parish church.