In one of his sermons, Eugene Laubach tells of a non-Quaker youth who was invited for a meal in a strict Quaker household. The youth was unfamiliar with Quaker piety and, in particular, with the custom of beginning a meal with a silent grace. He later reported his response to it: “There was this embarrassing silence when we first sat down at the table, and nobody knew what to say, and everybody looked down, so I told a funny story and that seemed to break the ice.”
To a TV-shaped world, silence, even relative silence, is as threatening as piety and much more puzzling. So people try to delete it. People haul their boom boxes to the seashore so that they do not have to live in the silence between the rolling of surf and the crying of gulls, and so that no one else can live there either. Years ago a live organist would play pop tunes at mezzo volume between innings at Detroit Tigers’ home baseball games. Now the management fills the stadium with a more aggressive, in-your-face form of recorded rock music. Late-afternoon and late-night TV talk shows present hours of lightweight nihilism carried along by a chatter that is sometimes rancorous and sometimes mildly amusing, but that is mostly what the Bible calls “unwholesome talk”—a kind of talk that is foolish, coarse, dismissive, incessant, and vain. (“So he goes, ‘You’re sexy.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa! This guy’s sleeping with my Mom!’ But he’s, like, kinda’ cute, so I go … “) Even contemporary worship, in some church settings, fills in silences with an emcee’s patter or with snappy Christian music from which all the rests have been removed.
A loss of silence is as serious as a loss of memory and just as disorienting. Silence is, after all, the natural context from which we listen. Silence is also the natural context from which we speak. A culture that fills in our silences therefore disorients us, removing the frame, the background, the base of intelligibility for our listening and speaking.
How is silence our natural context? Alternating silence, speech, and silence is the very rhythm of God, as old and deep in the nature of things as creation itself. According to Genesis, God breaks the cosmic silence with a creative word, but he does this only during the days. At nightfall and on the Sabbath, God falls silent. Correspondingly, there is for us, the creatures of God, a natural rhythm not only of work and rest, but also of sound and silence. “There is a time for everything,” says Ecclesiastes, “a time to be silent and a time to speak.”
But who knows how to tell time in this matter? Who knows when to speak up and when to keep still? Who knows when silence is golden and when it is lazy or even cowardly?
The wise know these things. Wise persons discern the deep grain and pattern of God’s world and try to live in ways that go with the grain. These are persons whose speech emerges from, and then re-enters, a thoughtful and disciplined silence. These are persons whose silence offers a roomy and welcoming harbor for the speech of others.
We have all met such persons. The good speakers among them show as much strength in their silences as in their words, and often as much eloquence. (This is also true of good composers; someone once observed that “the greatest music ever written is the silence between the Crucifixus and the Et Resurrexit in Bach’s Mass in B minor.”) Good speakers may say more or less than others, but usually less, and always less that needs to be taken back. Like Updike’s Tothero in ‘Rabbit Run,” they have “the disciplinarian’s trick” of pausing before they speak, of judging and considering their words in a way that adds weight to them. In public presentations, their speech has a spare quality: they stop speaking earlier than you expect and, perhaps, earlier than you would like. They give the impression of speaking from silence, from a “still point” at their center, a quiet place in which they are at home with themselves, in touch with God, and hospitable to the voices of others.
When we are in rhythm, we speak from silence. But we also listen there. We listen for the voices of others, trying to hear in them not only facts, but also qualities of heart and spirit. After all, the quaver or desolation or resentment or steel in the voice of another may tell us far more than the speaker’s words. But only a quiet soul can absorb and respond to these qualities.
Noisy souls, like boom boxes, drown out the cries of the gulls. It is the quiet soul that can receive the words, the tones, the timbre of another. A stilled soul can listen even to the silence of another.
In Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen, Danny Saunders,” who lives under the terrible, disciplined silence of his father, one day says to his friend Reuven: “You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it. … It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes—sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it.”
Saints listen for the sounds and silences of God. They quiet themselves into a kind of absorbency, a readiness to hear the Word of God, and also the voice of God, and even some of the silences of God. The silences of God—mysterious, exasperating, consoling, pregnant with meaning—require our trust at least as much as does the Word of God. God does not talk all the time, and God’s silence is as emphatic as his speech. Hence the force of Jesus’ silence before Pilate. To be a faithful creature of God is to learn something of God’s rhythm of silence and sound and silence, to respect and trust it, and then to imitate God by speaking and listening from the context that is as old as the world.
We shall not get silence, not even relative silence, at public beaches, or between innings at Tiger games, or on major network TV. But is there a chance, any chance at all, that we might take a cue from the Taize community and begin to protect small patches of silence in public worship? Wouldn’t this be equivalent to protecting our natural environment? And isn’t the church as good a place as any to practice ecological sensitivity?
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