Quieting Down

I've finally “got” silence...

Got it in the sense of remembering its purpose, but also in the sense of reclaiming its place in my life...

Silence has always been near and dear to me, off-the-scale introvert that I am. I need times of quiet to re-energize myself after times of social interaction. Silence is also the place where I would go to meet with God. I recently listened to an on-line interview* with Ian Morgan Cron who said some interesting things about silence in the church. He quoted Mother Teresa as having said, “Silence is God's first language. Everything else is a poor translation.” (To be accurate, it's a quote by a Fr. Thomas Keating.) I'm not sure I would completely agree with the quote, but I understand the heart place where it comes from. I think I would have said instead that silence is the 4G network of God, that everything else is insufficient bandwidth. Anyway, it got me thinking about silence and its place in my life. Ironically, I was doing my thinking on one of my walks, iPod music persistently playing in my head. I thought about how I used to walk in silence, pre-iPod, how I used to drive without the radio or CD player on, how I never turned the TV on during the day before the 5 p.m. news. In the past, prayer time had had a lot more silence, too, instead of the incessant one-way conversation - “I want...”, “They need...” - that it sometimes feels like now. I decided it was time to revisit silence.

There's a pond and wetlands that back up to our house, and one late afternoon, I took a chair out back with the intention of just sitting in silence for awhile, enjoying God's presence and His creation. As I sat quietly sipping a cup of tea, I was struck by how much noise was going on within the silence -birds, each with a different call; the swallows pecking for who-knows-what in the rain gutters of our house; the whisper of the breeze rubbing the marsh grass leaves together; the frogs croaking; the splash of bass, chasing smaller fish in the shallow water; the hum of bees; the chirp of crickets; the plunk and buzz of someone fishing on the other side of the pond with a lure guaranteed to drive bass crazy. I live in this beautiful piece of wetland wilderness and I regretted not taking the time to quiet myself and hear, really hear the wondrous sounds that are always emanating from it. It then occurred to me that a good part of the the purpose of silence is not for the quiet itself but for the ability to hear what is in that quiet, the quiet, small, but vital, voices within that silence.

The Bible is full of references to this relationship between silence and hearing - “Keep silence and hear, O Israel”; “...there was silence, then I heard a voice...”; “Men listened to me and waited and kept silence for my counsel”; “For God alone my soul waits in silence”; “Listen to me in silence, O coastlands...”** - and on and on. The classic ways in which we hear God – through His Word, through others, through our circumstances, through that still small voice. – all require a quietness or silence on our part. I can read Proverbs until my eyes bleed, but if I don't ask God “What do You want me to hear in this for my life today?” and then take the time to be quiet before Him, I may not get beyond a cursory understanding of what I have read. The same holds true for listening to other people, listening to our circumstances. I have to be quiet, if not silent, to hear the wisdom of others, to hear what this present circumstance is saying about this season of my life. And the Still Small Voice – the one I usually recognize to be too wise, too profound to be my own thought – requires both the desire to hear it and the silence to recognize it for what it is, God speaking into my life.

I've said enough. I'll be quiet now and go and find a place to be silent for awhile. Join me?

I’m wondering why we’re so uncomfortable with silence, and if our discomfort isn’t a warning light on our dashboard. Maybe comfort in silence could be considered a personal health goal.

                                                                                        - Donald Miller

*On Donald Miller's blog, http://storylineblog.com/2013/06/23/sunday-morning-sermon-the-importance-of-silence/

**Deuteronomy 27:9; Job 4:16; Job 29:21; Psalm 62:1Isaiah 41:1