My contact with the world of horses has been fleeting, episodic, and always linked to the farm work I experienced during my childhood during periods of summer vacations in the village. However, this anecdotal connection has allowed me to understand the attraction and creative inspiration that equines exerted on the pictorial production of Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

The surrealist lyricism of this poet with painterly wings—as Apollinaire (1880-1918) defined him—moved him to go beyond the mere physical appearance of the things that inhabit our earth and, through the fascination of unusual images, express his essential connection with another life filled with poetry and color. Domestic animals, especially horses, are constantly present in his paintings.

Regarding this thematic preference, he offered a revealing explanation when he was already in his late 90s: “These animals all remain silent… When I look at horses, which seem to be always in a state of ecstasy, I think: aren’t they perhaps happier than we are?”

Given the circumstances that have long engulfed our daily reality, even without falling into the involuntary muteness of these beasts of burden, it wouldn’t be strange to feel a compulsive bout of taciturnity, at least as a hygienic reaction to so much unbridled chatter that inundates us today. Man finds so little happiness in it that, according to Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), this fact would be enough to prove to what a great extent it separates him from his vocation, for his soul is not made for noise, but for recollection in God.

Centuries ago, Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) warned us: “You love discretion, Lord… Let the rhetoric of the world stay far away; let the chatter and dry eloquence of human wisdom stay, weak and ingenious, which you never like.”

Yet, every day we plunge into an increasing number of endless arguments and boundless gossip. Faced with the confusion and absurdity of our current world, it seems the first urgent thing to do is to remain silent. From that moment on, by shedding the burden that noise weighs down life, we are able to access, in our intimacy, the pure event that silence sharpens until it reaches the threshold of adoration.

Only he – warns Roger de Taizé (1915-2005) – allows us to overcome the limits that intelligence presents for the knowledge of the profound and, through the contemplative abyss, open it to unsuspected possibilities.

Although coexistence involves and demands communication, authentic speech is primarily composed of silence (what is left unsaid out of common sense, respect, prudence, etc.). Thus, from its nakedness, each word leaps into the depths of the listener, revealing the penetrating power of the quiet word. It is then that its transformative energy comes into play, gradually renewing the person and leading them into the mystery of the limits of language and the world.

At that juncture—far from the heat of passion and the clamor of immediacy—we reach the threshold of the profound and enter into the beating heart of all that exists, where intelligence glimpses unsuspected possibilities. It is the silent journey that, by filling us internally with plenitude, tells us everything without saying anything. When the voices of men and the noise of things are suppressed, life takes on a suggestive emotion: it is the eloquence of silence. In those moments, if one truly wants to act seriously, what one must do is remain silent.

If in our days it is becoming increasingly difficult to find havens of environmental tranquility appropriate to our condition as seekers of God, the circumstances that place us in that silence that leads to the joy of union with the Creator and of which Saint Teresa of Jesus (1515-1582) spoke to us must be even more demanding: “In this dwelling [interior, where God is in our soul…] the soul is almost always still… Everything that the Lord benefits the soul and teaches it here passes so noiselessly that…, in this dwelling of His, only He and the soul rejoice in the greatest silence.”

Pedro Paricio. givemethreeminutes