Listening for the Silent Cry | March 15, 2026 | Rev. Dr. Kathryn Benton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9dSLBNOopE

Sound over all wa­ters, reach out from all lands,

The chor­us of voic­es, the clasp­ing of hands;

Sing hymns that were sung by the stars of the morn,

Sing songs of the an­gels when Je­sus was born.

Blow, bu­gles of bat­tle, the march­es of peace;

East, west, north, and south, let the strong quar­rel cease;

Sing songs of great joy that the an­gels be­gan,

Of glo­ry to God and of good will to man!

With glad ju­bi­la­tions, bring hope to the na­tions,

The dark night is end­ing, and dawn has be­gun;

Rise, hope of the ag­es, arise like the sun;

All speech flow to mu­sic, all hearts beat as one,

All speech flow to mu­sic, all hearts beat as one.

The opening music is an old Welsh tune with lyrics from John Greenleaf Whittier. The vocalist highlighted on the recording is Theresa Thomason from the Middle Church Choir in New York City.

Today marks the celebration of Mothering Sunday in Great Britain. Traditionally, this was a day that children, mainly daughters, who were working elsewhere as servants, would be given the day off to see their mothers. Historically, this was a time when people would visit their ‘mother church’ in the middle of Lent. This also became an occasion of meeting with mothers and the whole family. This can be a celebration for us too. We can celebrate the sound over the waters…the water of life that heralds the ending of the dark night…the beating of all hearts as one. This may seem like too great of a stretch at this horrendous time in the history of the world. Yet, I think the power of the Divine Feminine…the mothering spirit…of perhaps The Great Mother, even Mother Earth may possess the power needed to make our way through this time. 

I’d like to share the viewpoints of several women that seem to symbolize this spirit. I will begin with the words of Olive Schreiner on this topic of mothering. I felt these words might speak to our current moment of war and the apparent triumph of hate…despite the birthing and the mothering, we all received in childhood.

There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children,

or merely be potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield

covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her,

“So many mothers’ sons! So many young bodies brought into the world

to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones

and muscles were shaped within!

So many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be!

So many baby mouths drawing life at women’s breasts; -

all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen faces,

and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed –

this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh,

that next year’s grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener

and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have

a glint of white bones!”

And we cry, “Without an inexorable cause, this must not be!”

No woman who is a woman says of a human body, “It is nothing!”

Now Olive Schreiner was not herself a mother, which highlights the fact that you don’t have to experience giving birth to a child in order to understand the anguish felt when a life is seen as nothing…as without value. Now we all know that parenting is never perfect. We are human beings, living in a context, with certain limitations.

A holocaust survivor and psychologist Alice Miller discusses these limitations in her book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979). In this book she highlights the need for parents to respect their children…something that I often address with the people I work with in therapy. She wrote of the consequences when parents are not able to respect their children. She wrote:

Where there is no such respect, their children seek refuge from a painful truth in ideologies. Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt into the dangerous, destructive disrespect for human life,

glorified as a political program.

Alice Miller knew something about fascist leaders. She seems to be describing our current leaders…in the United States and elsewhere who can endure the destruction of not only human life, but life as we know it on our precious Mother Earth. Miller goes on to describe ways to heal child abuse and trauma. But she became a famous critic of psychoanalytic psychology at the time, which tended to blame the child and side with the parents at all costs.

The underlying need to respect life…the life of the child and all life seems to be absent in our waring world…in our disconnected reality. It is this reality that professor/philosopher Dorothee Soelle addressed in her consideration of mysticism and resistance entitled, The Silent Cry. Of God…the divine power she wrote:

It is a mystical name for God, whose divine power is not grounded in domination and commandment. It is a name that everyone can use, everyone who misses the “silent cry” that has often become inaudible among us.

It is this silent cry that we need to listen for…it is the inaudible that must become audible in our time. It is the voice of the mother…the divine feminine that values life…the life of all creatures, of all plants, of all life. It is also, to be sure, the voice of those who have gone before…our ancestors. We need their guidance…we need their wisdom.

I have been investigating this idea of communication with the ancestors this past year, since the death of Dorsey Blake. I have been able to converse with him at times, though I realize that I have to be in the correct mindset…and I need to listen deeply. This listening has something, I think, to do with listening to ourselves…to the sound of the genuine in yourself. This listening then, can be extended to an awareness…a listening to those who have passed on. Thurman says:

There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is so much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a thought in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through to you…

And when we are able to silence the traffic of our minds, we should, in addition to our own name…our own identity, also be able to hear the voice of those ancestors…those related by blood and those related by circumstance…by relationship, calling our name. It may be the sound of the silent cry that Soelle was talking about…the cry of the mother. Is this the sound of the genuine…the real coming through?

I can’t resist quoting Howard Thurman one more time before we finish.  Later in the same speech, Thurman addressed our ability to connect through this silent cry…through the sound of the genuine. He said:

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

And it is the music with which we began… the sound over all waters heralding the birth of peace, love and joy…it is the chorus of voices…the songs of the angels, leading to marches of peace.

Bring on the glad jubilations of hope…it is the end of the dark night that beckons the dawn of a new world in which all speech flows to music…all hearts beat as one. A world in which we are all one. Let’s listen deeply for the sound of the genuine…listen deeply for that New World…It’s coming!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDtYeOxvVjJ4w&v=tYeOxvVjJ4w