Silence

FROM THE RECTOR

There are many different kinds of silence. There's the beautiful quiet that we encounter first thing in the morning, and there's the peaceful quiet we embrace when our minds stop racing as we drift off to sleep at night. There's the playful and energetic silence of hiding around the corner while waiting to startle a friend, and there’s the agonizing silence of sitting at a bedside waiting for our loved one to take her last breath.

In his book The Edge of Words, Rowan Williams writes that there is no such thing as an empty silence. Even though they are devoid of any verbal communication, a silence always reflects the situation that surrounds it, saying something that words cannot. Using the example of those few moments of silence held by an audience after a symphonic or theatrical performance, Williams notes that “this silence is precisely what the performance has made possible, or indeed made imperative: it is significant because of what has been said or done” (159).

In a moment of silence, we are always aware that something is not being said, even if we do not know what that something is. In that way, silence always beckons us forward, pulling us from where we have started and urging us into what follows. Never static, silence often communicates to us more powerfully than words or music or any other auditory stimulus ever could.

When sitting beside a friend in a moment of profound grief, we recognize that words cannot do justice to that moment, so we offer our inadequate selves to them in a wordless encounter, and they receive from us an authentic expression of love. But, when standing beside a friend as they endure some unfair criticism or even when they are the victim of a cruel joke, our scared silence as a refusal to speak conveys to that friend the failure of our love. In many ways, our silence speaks.

In the first part of her systematic theology, God, Sexuality, and the Self, Sarah Coakley identifies contemplation as “an act of willed ‘vulnerability’ to divine action.” Because the trinitarian God is “power-in-vulnerability,” when one becomes silent, she writes, “one cooperates with the promptings of divine desire” (343). When we seek silence, we seek God’s presence and communication, which we can only receive when we ourselves stop speaking. Silence, in other words, is how God speaks to us because silence is how we make space for God.

As Williams writes,

If there are gaps in our speech that, by bracketing the struggle for control or ultimate reduction, show what it is that happens when the ego is dispossessed, even for a moment, then the ‘gap’ in the world of struggle and aspiration to power represented by the silence or impotence of what might be thought to be power without limit takes on a further dimension of significance (180).

In Mark 3, before Jesus heals the man with the withered hand in the synagogue on the sabbath, he asks the religious authorities a question: “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Jesus knew that those authorities were waiting for him to the break sabbath rules in order that they might accuse him, so he asked them the sort of question a child might ask, making overly simple a complex issue that scholars might debate to no end. Yet, in response to his question, the religious leaders were silent, and Jesus got angry.

Mark tells us that, after the religious authorities remained silent, Jesus looked around at them with anger. Mark notes that he was grieved at their hardness of heart. I believe the thing that grieved Jesus the most was their silence—their misuse of one of the greatest tools that God has given us to learn about and listen to what God is trying to tell us.

Instead of inhabiting a silence in which their convictions, determinations, and preconceptions were susceptible to the work of God’s Spirit, those authorities filled that silence with their own made-up minds. Instead of making space for God to show them something they may not have considered, they abused that silence by refusing to allow God to be present in it. And that made Jesus sad.

The question of whether Jesus’ decision to heal the man’s withered hand on the sabbath was a faithful act was ripe for theological debate. Although the provision to save a life trumps any rules about sabbath observance, because the man’s life was not in danger, the healing could have waited until the sabbath was over. But, with his question, Jesus asks the religious scholars of the day whether there is a difference in doing good and saving a life. I can imagine a fruitful rabbinical debate filling that synagogue for the rest of that sabbath afternoon, but such an inquiry into God’s will becomes impossible when we refuse to make space for God to teach us something—when we prefer hearing the voice of our own convictions over the silence that beckons God to speak.

Often silence makes us uncomfortable because silence is fundamentally an expression of our own vulnerability. Because it is an act by which we are dispossessed of total control, we are often scared to discover what silence will reveal to us about ourselves, about others, and about God. Yet silence is a powerful tool—maybe the most powerful tool at our disposal to encounter something of deepest significance. I think it grieves Jesus when our hearts are so hard that we are too afraid to sit with God in silence.

Silence isn’t easy. Silence takes practice. Sharing that silence with others can help. At St. Paul’s, we offer opportunities for shared silence every day of the week. Going out of your way to make silence a part of your day may seem silly—like scheduling empty time on your all-too-busy calendar—but how else will you learn to step aside in order for God to step in?

Whether alone at home, in a sacred space like the church, or gathered with other practitioners, I invite you to try ten minutes of silence every day for three weeks. Let me know what that silence teaches you and how it changes your relationships with God, others, and yourself. Even after years of daily practice, we may not know what that silence is saying to us, but we will recognize that it is saying something worth listening to.

Yours faithfully,

Evan D. Garner