Amid the upheavals of music in the twentieth century, a new approach emerged for rendering the sacred in concert music: the use of silences, both real and analogical, to unveil spiritual meaning and activity in the world around the listener. Composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina, Henryk Górecki, and James MacMillan prevailed upon silences both literal and analogical in their music to affectively direct their listeners' attention to the ostensible presence of the divine active in the world around them. A key inciting factor for the emergence of such music seems to be historical suffering or political oppression, whether written amid such instances, or responding to it after the fact. In the use of silence to explore spiritual meaning and encounter, such music often doesn't directly engage the stark realities within which it emerges. Rather it guides its listeners' attention to a more essential divine meaning or address which itself operates as an answer to such contexts. This paper examines three orchestral works to this end: Górecki's 1976 Symphony No. 3 ('Sorrowful Songs'); MacMillan's 2002 Symphony No. 3 ('Silence'); and Pärt's 2008 Symphony No. 4 ('Los Angeles'). It examines each composer's relationship with political and social engagement, and considers the way their respective theological commitments express differing approaches to manifesting silence as an instantiation of divine presence and meaning in response to instances of historical suffering and political injustice.