on a rock in the wild sea there were those who prayed in their sacred solitude, stone cloisters shaped like beehives but no buzz was heard; history littered with silence, saints and sinners with God in their ears and a weight upon their tongues and nothing nothing but the roar of the waves and the testimony of the gulls to form their gospel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about silence, lately. Real, actual silence. The kind we can’t really have anymore, in this world. As an introvert who has always been very easily amused, I have always prided myself on the notion that I am happy with silence. Happy by myself.
But then again…I can’t remember the last time I experienced true silence, or even if I ever have. The silence of hermitage. The silence of remoteness, of actual solitude. Our world isn’t built for it, anymore. There’s always an airplane passing overhead, an Internet signal to keep us connected, a chance for the phone to ring. We can create a facsimile of silence by finding a quiet corner, turning off our devices, driving out into the wilderness, but it’s extremely difficult to find our way back to its true source. To actual silence, the way our familial and spiritual ancestors experienced it.
Sometimes, I am in two minds about silence. The mystic in me loves the way it is praised by writers throughout history, the way it can be the place where we learn most about ourselves. At its best, silence is a space ready to be filled with God.
But, I have to confess…sometimes I think we idolize silence a little too much. We act as though true spiritual catharsis can’t happen without it, and we punish ourselves when we don’t have access to it.
I believe that what we really need isn’t necessarily silence, it’s pause. Silence can be passive, can happen to us, but to pause is an action. It’s something we do. It’s putting a stop to meaningless noise, mindless chatter, and pointless chaos. It’s purposeful, a stepping away that we must choose, or it won’t happen.
Nowhere in Scripture does it say that God is silence. But it does say that He is the Word, the only conversation worth having when all around us is disarray. The healing sound that cuts through the empty void.
None of us (as far as I know) can ever be the Celtic hermits in their stone huts, clinging to cliffs and never speaking a word to another human. None of us should have the expectation that silence is the cure to all of our problems. We have lives to live, commitments to attend to. We are surrounded by hearts aching for words of comfort, not the cold shoulder. For better or worse, we are more connected in more ways than we ever have been, as a species.
But a pause…a pause is doable. A pause is a place for a conversation with the Word. Whether it’s two minutes or two hours, a purposeful pause is an opportunity waiting to happen. It’s an inhaled breath before the shared laughter of reunion between Creator and Created.
In the pause, God speaks our names. And only in the pause do we hear them properly.
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I chose to live in an area where silence was the norm. So far it has stayed that way. I treasure what I have.
I don't consider the solitude of nature to be "true" silence, to be honest. It's not the womblike aloneness of a sensory deprivation chamber, or a hermit's cave where the only sounds might be the crackle of a fire or the clockwork drip of water down some immemorial flue of stone. It's... more like listening to the world going about its business as God intended. And it's quite noisy, as the last stanza of your poem illustrates perfectly. The song of birds. The babble of a creek. Some little critter scrabbling about in the bushes. All His voice. It's the heartbeat of the world, and when we hear it our souls yearn for Eden.