In talking to a pious young priest the other day, one who strives for punctilio in keeping all the rubrics in place while saying Mass, I asked about the length of the pause he observes before beginning the Penitential Rite. I was curious to know why he doesn’t stretch it out a bit, allowing the rest of us more time in order actually to call to mind our sins as Mother Church enjoins us to do. Do we really want to shorten the drama of self-examination to a nanosecond?

The point is, some of us have got rather more than just a few sins to recollect before making a public admission of our wickedness. Before expressly telling God, that is, how greatly we have sinned, repeatedly striking our breasts for all that we’ve done or failed to do, mightn’t a little more time be spent working up a list of our iniquities? Otherwise, we risk entering the Sacred Mysteries in an ill-prepared state.

His answer was that in the older formula that might have been the case, but no longer. It used to be, he explained, that the priest would say, “Let us call to mind our sins,” suggesting an interval spent in salutary silence during which the congregation was expected to inventory, as it were, their souls. So many shortcomings we must bring before our mind’s eye before addressing ourselves out loud to God! Since then, however, the wording has changed, and the formula now reads, “Let us acknowledge our sins,” thus collapsing in effect the time spent between silent recollection and that of rendering a formal account of our guilt before God for having committed them.

Why would we want to do that, I ask? Isn’t it both helpful and necessary to summon before our eyes all that we’ve done or failed to do, if only as a mental exercise performed by the soul before giving witness to that fact when facing Almighty God? An old and wise priest I used to know would often say to his penitents that their task was quite simple: “Just carry all the broken pieces of your life to God. And with humility and trust, ask him to forgive you. In asking God to put the pieces back together again, you’ll be giving him a reason to smile.”

Yes, but that takes time, which nowadays we just don’t seem to have enough of; thus, we tend to gallop along to the finish line, forgetting the process we so thoughtlessly left behind. Especially when it involves silence, which more and more is seen as the enemy, and so we must thwart its aggressions at every turn. Even in our most intimate dealings with God we tend to grow fretful when things fall silent. For instance, at the very beginning of the Divine Liturgy, which is the supreme act of Christian worship, we seem to shrink before so unwelcome an intrusion. It is as if in the silence there really were nothing for us to do.

And yet in that very silence, as we are reminded by Max Picard, renowned author of perhaps the most moving treatment on the subject, The World of Silence, “things are made whole again.” Restored. Repristinated. Nothing so knits together our scattered selves more than silence. Even language itself, he tells us, “holds its breath and fills its lungs in the pure and original air of silence.”

How else are we to approach the Lord of the Universe if not in silence and supplication, preferably on our knees, entreating the Deity to hollow out a space in our hearts for him in order that we may adore him alone? “Silence is a great mystery,” says Romano Guardini in his wonderful book on The Virtues, “which does not mean only that no word is spoken and no sound is uttered. This alone does not signify silence; the animal is capable of this, and the rock even more so. Rather, silence is that which takes place when man, after speaking, returns to himself and grows still; or when he who could speak remains still.”

And what exactly is the point of remaining still? The better to know God, that is the point. Thus do we grow acutely conscious of the awful distance we have created between ourselves and God by our sins. Indeed, we cannot even begin to know God without that stillness which allows us to enter into the silence of the mystery surrounding his majesty. Only in silence, therefore, are we able to approach the living God. “This is so true,” says Guardini, “that building one’s whole existence upon silence has become for some the form of their religious life. It is a daring enterprise,” he adds, “which, if it is properly carried out, leads into the silent Kingdom of God itself.”

“Teach us to care and not to care,” declares the poet T.S. Eliot, “even among these rocks.” Who among us is worthy to do that without having at least begun to cultivate the habit of quietly composing himself before God? And that is precisely what the Penitential Rite should be for. To learn to stand in silence before God with such intensity of attention as to become all at once aware of the two realities on which the whole of the spiritual life turns, i.e., myself and God.

How old must one be for that to happen? “When I was fifteen,” John Henry Newman recounts in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “a great change of thought took place in me … making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.”

And while most of us are perhaps not so precocious as the young Newman was, nevertheless, it is never too late to start. If getting up in the morning is the first step to sanctity, and if nothing beats rising with the sun, why not start the day with a stretch of silence, especially at Mass? What better accompaniment to acknowledging our sins than to call them to mind amid the silence of God?