One of the things I worry that my
children and grandchildren will be most deprived of in this busy world they are
entering is silence, especially when it comes to being silent together. Being
silent together is a lost art. Every day there are more and more things that
fill our lives with background noise, making it harder to think, harder to
meditate and harder to discern God’s voice in all the madness.
You see this with the various
screens that we put in front of ourselves: TV screens and computer screens and
smart phone screens and tablet screens and many more. The audio and visual
noise is comforting, even the vibration of a phone on so-called “silent” mode gives
us positive feedback with every text message or Snap Chat. Every month and week
and day silence is more elusive.
Young
people are so comfortable in front of a screen, in fact, that there’s only one
way I’ve found to make that screen a source of discomfort, and that’s when the
screen itself is silent. There’s this video in the NOOMA series by Rob Bell
called Noise that I love to show to
groups whenever I get the chance. Now, if I showed teenagers a ten minute video
of people getting their heads cut off, or getting shot by guns, or if it had
images of poverty and disease, or gratuitous sex, or countless other things
that would give a movie an “R” rating, they would still be relatively
comfortable because they expect to see horrible images on the screen, because,
in spite of the fact that they are seeing things that would terrify them in
person, the screen gives them a measure of comfort and distance. However, this
Rob Bell video makes them uncomfortable in a way that the images of gore cannot,
because—after an initial couple minutes of background noise and conversation,
televisions and radios; music and sounds that you can’t even quite make out—the
audio cuts out completely and the following eight minutes are completely
silent.
No audio. Nothing. Instead, words slowly
appear on the screen every so often, asking questions like, “Do you have a TV?
… More than one TV? … Do you have a radio on all day?” And on and on. Until it
comes back around with statements like, “If God sometimes feels distant to us,
maybe it's not because he's not talking to us, but simply because we aren't
really listening.”
Here’s what I’ve found when I show
this video to youth groups. In the first minute of silence they immediately
become idiots—poking one another, searching for their phones that I took away
before this little experiment, and generally just misbehaving. They start to
giggle and smile awkwardly at me like this is a joke, and it just becomes
evident that they cannot handle the
silence. They absolutely cannot. The room feels heavy and uncomfortable
and none of them want to be there. In fact, one or two of them will get up in
the first couple minutes to go to the bathroom and they won’t come back until
it’s over. By minutes 2-3 the squirrelly-ness tends to subside, but instead you
see a lot of looking at their watches (if they have one) or the clock on the
wall. You have kids who start to mouth, “How long is this?”
And you might think that this is how
it is for the entire eight minutes. Our expectation is that we will be
uncomfortable as long as silence is kept. In fact, I think if you’d ask people,
their first instinct might be that the longer the silence is kept the more the
level of discomfort will rise. However, eventually, the exact opposite happens.
By five minutes in the giggling and awkward smiles and the fidgeting in their
seats will slowly stop. By minute six the young people will inevitably become
very still and focused.
Then, the coolest thing of all
happens at the end of the video. When the words stop appearing after eight
minutes of silence, the sound briefly returns, and the video winds to a close.
Then, it’s often the case that nobody will speak for ten or twenty seconds.
Silence, which was once the most uncomfortable thing, becomes exactly the opposite—it
becomes their norm—in the span of eight minutes.
I believe this is profoundly
important for us as Christians, because the Christian life is impossible without
leaving space for God to meet us, and God tends to meet us in two distinct
ways: one is in people who cross our path, who we often ignore because of the
many distractions that are taking up our senses, and the other is in the
silence, which we fear.
When God appears to Elijah that day
on Mt. Horeb this is not an unusual way for God
to make himself known. God loves to come in the silence. As 1 Kings tells us: “There
was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks
in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord
was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord
was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer
silence” (vs 11-12). For years and years translators translated those last few
words as a “still small voice” because nobody knew what the sound of sheer
silence could be, but in the Hebrew that is what it says, “The sound of small,
tiny, or sheer silence.” Silence has a weight to it; we can feel it, sensing
something of its gravity, and because of that gravity we should hardly be
surprised that there is where God meets us—not in wind or earthquakes or fire;
not in things that we ironically call “acts of God.”
Audiences love a bang, but God does
not come like a Michael
Bay movie. God does not
stoop to the lowest level of human excitement—the part of us looking for an
explosion—instead God shows up in ways we might not expect and demonstrates
again and again how backwards our understanding of power is. Powerful people
fear silence more than the powerless, because powerful people have a voice and
a stage from which to speak. So, God comes to the powerless in part because
they are the only ones ready to hear him. We hear a lot about finding our
voices and speaking up for the things we believe in, which is important for
making a difference in this world, but when we begin to talk louder and louder
not for the love of others but for our own gain we quickly lose the ability to
listen, and every time we’re not listening we may be missing the God who comes
in that silence. Then, in turn, we fear the silence that has become our enemy.
Not
everybody who keeps silence has profound experiences of God—certainly not every
time—but that’s not the only goal. We don’t keep silence because we expect God to
intervene and make our difficult choices for us. We keep silence as a
confession of faith that our voices do not matter compared to the one who spoke
creation into being. So even if God never says a word to us in our entire lives,
the silence will not have been in vain, because it will be a mark of our desire
to place God before ourselves. If we gain any wisdom from keeping silence, all the better, but that's not the goal or the point of it.
The
silence that makes us uncomfortable also gives us life. Like most fears it must
be experienced in order to be overcome, but unlike some fears it is always near
us, always hanging over our heads. You all know the people who have to be talking
in order to justify how great they are; the people who we say “like to hear
their own voice.” Mostly we know these people because we are that person from
time to time. And lest you think you are a good, mild-mannered Lutheran who’s
never said a word against anybody, I can assure you that those words still pass
through your mind and in that way interrupt your own personal silence. The
difference between saying them and keeping them to yourselves is actually very
little if they occupy your thoughts either way. This is why we confess every
Sunday that we sin in thought, word, and deed, because every stinking week we
break the silence where God might be speaking to us with our own banal thoughts
and words.
The miracle on Mt. Horeb
wasn’t so much that God spoke in utter silence but instead that Elijah wasn’t
so occupied with the fire and earthquakes and terrible winds that he missed it.
And that’s the challenge for those of us who live lives enveloped in noise. God
may be speaking just as much to us as he was to Elijah and we may have no idea.
Meanwhile, our noisy distractions are ratcheting up our own stresses and
dependency on the devices that we love. It’s self-perpetuating and
destructive—first of conversation, second of community, and third of hearing God.
So, I have a simple prayer for you
this day. May you find the silence you need. May you find the time and space to
leave distractions behind. And may God bless you in that time so that,
re-entering this world of noise, you may be comforted in knowing God is with
you not in the wind or fire or earthquakes but in the silence that is always
with you, always threatening to break in to your life. Let it. It’s going to
mean a few minutes of discomfort but it is followed by a life-time of greater
meaning.
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