Silence as Bravery (Silence III)

Silence is a ‘doable’ practice, but it will take commitment. Furthermore, it will take courage. It takes character to face the fears that tell us to avoid silence altogether. In silence, we must face our fear that, while God is good, perhaps He is not that good. Perhaps not good enough to fully receive and embrace us, not considering how screwed up we may feel. Indeed, before silence opens our souls to God, it first makes us face our doubt and anxiety, both about God and about ourselves. Silence is vulnerable because it makes us face our need for God.

Or, perhaps we avoid silence because we fear that God is truly good, which remains a terrifying reality to our ego, even if we desperately want it to be true.[1] Our ego does not want to be dependent on God, even if he’s a loving God, because this, too, will mean a loss of control (even if our control makes us miserable). Thus, many Christians are happy to avoid silence, never developing an inner life through which they might hear and recognize God’s loving voice. Hearing that voice, we intuit, will mean responsibility, and we are often eager to avoid accountability. Many of us are quite comfortable staying in The Human Paradigm of religious works because we are safe from encountering God while we’re on the treadmill of performance.

Furthermore, silence will make us face things we might rather avoid—things about ourselves and about the realities of life. Our sorrow at the loss of a friend or a friendship, our anger at a betrayal, or the loneliness that drives addiction within us. I have worked hard at trimming my vices, but I’ve also found that vices are like Whack-A-Moles. They keep cropping up unless I address the sorrow beneath them. During the last few months as a pastor, I have felt great sorrow as people have left our congregation for a variety of reasons, some of which I understand, and others which I struggle to grasp. And one of the temptations I have faced is to numb out the pain by buying something. Greed, after all, is a fairly widely-accepted vice in our society, despite the fact that Jesus focused on it as much as any other sin. (For example, I have never had someone come into my home and say, “Wow, you have a lot of books… Do you struggle with greed?”)

I have recognized, thankfully and by God’s grace, that buying things to numb my pain during this season would just be a way of creating more noise for my soul to focus on, as opposed to wrestling with the sorrow which I need to face and not avoid. So I have been intentional to create times of silence—sitting by my bedside, in the shower, and on long walks—in which I can breathe and simply remind myself that God is with me. This has re-enforced me in the wonderful reality that God meets us in our silence and in our pain. God would have us sit with ourselves, so that He can sit with us, too.

But this takes courage and trust. And wisdom, too, and the leading of God’s Spirit. Sometimes our soul does need to avoid sorrow or immerse itself in distraction or noise. Sometimes those things can, in moderation, help to restore us. But our lives become unbalanced without silence; ultimately, we have to face what we would prefer to avoid if we are to be transformed by God. Silence, then, is the cardinal virtue of bravery within spiritual life. In silence, we strengthen our soul to live with God. In silence, we lessen the ego’s grip on our soul, creating space for our spirit to breathe.

It takes courage to live The Slow Life. Rather than avoiding our anxiety by avoiding silence, we’re choosing to face it so that, beyond it, we can see who God is. Seeing Him and hearing His voice will finally bring us into reality and into freedom. As we create spaces for silence, we will find God speaking. We will be surprised by the insights we have and things we start to know and understand. We will discover ourselves “walking in the Spirit.”[2] We will discover how Jesus speaks and guides and directs us, like the Good Shepherd he is. Life, in short, will become an abundant adventure as Jesus’ voice opens us to the work of God’s Spirit in and through us.

[1] Romans 8:7ff

[2] Cf., for example, Galatians 5:25

The Gift of Silence (Silence II)

Imagine riding down the freeway at 100 miles an hour, your head out the window. Imagine the wind whipping around you so that you can barely hear anything, save for the roar of the road. Now imagine the whisper of God’s Spirit, coming as a “still, small voice.” [1] You can’t hear it, drowned as it is by the noise. That’s what both hurriedness and endless noise do: they cripple us from hearing the whisper of God’s Spirit that keeps us grounded in God Himself.

God’s voice most often comes as a whisper. And we must hear that whisper if we are to see Christ “fully formed within us.”[2] Without that grounding whisper, we are too easily deceived about what life is all about. We become vulnerable to the inner voices of shame and guilt and despair. The more stressed, the more hurried, the more frazzled, the more overstimulated we are by the barrage of noise, the more difficult it is for us to hear the voice of God. No wonder it’s hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God![3] Distraction of any sort—and this certainly includes the noisy distraction of money—is enough to keep us from ever engaging our soul’s deepest longing for God. And with so many things to distract us, why would we create space to face our inner fear of silence? Spiritual life is wonderfully connected to the body. If we are tired, it becomes much easier to ignore the whisper of our spirit telling us to make wise choices. And if our bodies are over-encumbered with noise, we have the same problem; we become dulled to both the voice of our conscience and the voice of God.

If our soul is going to thrive in awareness of God’s grace, if our lives are to be empowered to love others with purpose and power, if our ears are going to hear the whisper of God’s Spirit which leads us into a life of abundance, we need some barrier between us and the wall of sound to help us stay grounded in the life of God. This is what silence is about: it’s about establishing time and space to encounter the reality of God in the inner quiet of our hearts. In silence, we train our souls to be with God. This is the gift and power of silence. When we create it, we begin to discover that God is speaking, and that we can train ourselves to recognize and know the whisper of His voice around us and in us. Silence, then, is a boulder in the river of life, forming a retreat out of life’s noisy rapids.

When I experienced, in college, the depression that left me wondering where on earth God was, it was in silence in the cafeteria that I heard an almost audible voice of Jesus. I was sitting in an empty cafeteria, full of anger and sorrow, trying to pray. I’d been depressed for months, all the fear I had buried over many years is finding its way out (as it always does). I just wanted the struggle—the “dark night”—to be over. I rapped my fists on the table in frustration, saying, “God, why can’t I just learn whatever it is You want me to learn?” And in one of the strangest moments of my life, I heard the voice of God. Not audibly, but just as clear in my heart and mind as the words you’re reading on this paper. It says: You must unlearn what you have learned. My body, which is curled over the table in frustration, bolts upright. I look around for a voice, that’s how clear it was. You must unlearn what you have learned.

(The kicker came three days later, when I was randomly in the dorm room of a friend of a friend. I noticed a Star Wars flip-a-page-each-day calendar sitting on a desk. The picture for the day was of Yoda, and it included a quote: “You must unlearn what you have learned.” I had an out-of-body experience, my brain careening out of my head. I guess the Holy Spirit can speak through Yoda. Who knew?)

While I wish that I had this sort of nearly audible experience all the time, I don’t. My dominant experience of hearing the whisper of God’s Spirit is just that: it comes as a whisper. But silence is the space that prepares our heart to receive God’s voice, however it comes. If we learn to hear it in the silence of our hearts, we will carry that whisper with us even when the world around us is loud.

Indeed, we are meant to thrive in silence. Silence relieves stress and can perhaps even regenerate brain cells.[4] Studies have demonstrated that silence has a measurable physiological effect, reducing anxiety and changing our brain patterns. The consistent practice of silence can quite literally rewire our brains. Silence will, in concrete terms, put us in contact with the Spirit of God. So when Scripture tells us to “cast all your anxiety onto Jesus,” we should note that our bodies are poised to release anxiety when they are primed by silence.[5] Or when Scripture tells us to “be still and know that [He is] God,” we should be confident that silence and stillness is a spiritual and bodily medium through which God speaks and through which the knowledge of God comes.[6]

When we are especially pressed or stressed by life, it becomes all the more urgent to spend time—more time, in fact, not less—in silence. When that happens for me, I go to our local nature center to be reminded of God’s grace all around me. I then seek to carry this awareness with me back into the roar of life’s river. Even as an occasional practice—but ultimately, ideally, as an enduring habit—the discipline of silence will help to transform our bodies, our hearts, our minds, and our spirits, grounding us in our adoption and empowering us to love others as God does.

[1] See, for example, I Kings 19:12

[2] Galatians 4:19

[3] Matthew 19:24

[4] Nautilus Magazine, Online, ‘This is Your Brain on Silence.’ August 24, 2014. http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence (March 4, 2017)

[5] I Peter 5:7

[6] Psalm 46:10

The Problem of Noise and the Hope of Silence (Silence I)

Without silence, it is virtually impossible to grow in the spiritual life.[1]
— Henri Nouwen

I recently saw a sound chart listing the noisiest and quietest places in America. It was disconcerting to see that I live in one of the loudest stretches of land this side of the Mississippi. If you step out of my doorway, even on a quiet morning, you don’t even have to listen too closely to hear the sound of the 405. In fact, you can hear the freeway from most anywhere in my town. Which is just an example of a larger reality: we are inundated with noise.

This prevalence of noise is, historically speaking, a relatively recent phenomenon. If you lived in a village in Medieval Europe, the sound of your day would have been, largely, the sound of silence. The peal of church bells would have been a stunning interruption to an otherwise quiet noise horizon. The timpani roll of thunder would have stirred your soul more deeply than it does ours, inured as we are by constant sound. Indeed, for most of human history, it is relative quiet that has marked the world; even in urban centers, you could find real silence, especially at night. And with the silence, actual darkness—no eternally-blazing neon lights. But that has all changed, and it has changed relatively recently, largely within the last century. Indeed, the modern world, with its myriad marvels, brings a barrage of sound. Today, it is quite possible to avoid silence altogether—and this long after Florence Nightingale wrote that “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on [the] sick or well.”[2]

She was quite right. As reported in Nautilus magazine: “In the mid-20th century, epidemiologists discovered correlations between high blood pressure and chronic noise sources like highways and airports. Later research seemed to link noise to increased rates of sleep loss, heart disease, and tinnitus. It’s this line of research that hatched the 1960s-era notion of noise pollution, “a name that implicitly refashions transitory noises as toxic and long-lasting.”[3] Constant noise activates cortisol—a stress hormone—which increases anxiety and, ultimately, deteriorates the mind and body. And in the midst of all of this, there’s some part of our soul that simply wants to sit in silence.

Growing up, I was taught to have a time of silence, every day if possible. We called it a “quiet time,” a space devoted to silence, scripture, and prayer. Most Christians I knew were directed by someone with authority to have a quiet time. And most of us—myself included—struggled to maintain consistent times of silence. Maybe this was because we tended to relate to solitude and silence as a task to perform, and so we resisted or resented it. Maybe it was because silence can be uncomfortable. Maybe it was because silence forces us to confront ourselves (not to mention God) and there were things within us that we didn’t want to face. Maybe all of the above.

But this issue is even more complex; the noise problem is about more than just sound. In fact, much of the noise we face isn’t even audible. Social media may not make a sound, but it makes a lot of noise. It stimulates us into constant “connectedness,” thinking, hearing, listening, and comparing ourselves to others. We can—all at once—have access to five hundred channels on television, two hundred and fifty stations on satellite radio, and a thousand sort-of-conversations on Facebook. We can, in short, be constantly stimulated.

This sort of overstimulation comes in many forms. Shopping at an American grocery store can be difficult because of the endless options: diverse kinds of tuna and brands of bread and varieties of cheese. When friends from New Zealand visited me and Becca, they felt overwhelmed by the lack of simplicity and the overabundance of options. In fact, having too many choices can tax our souls more than having too few. And we now live in a world in which we need never be bored. We have endless websites which we can access at any moment no further away than our front pockets. We have so many ways to keep the conversation in our mind always running, always occupied, never quiet.

So just as we live in world engulfed in hurry, we live in a world saturated with noise, both audible and inaudible. Even if we want to create space for our souls to sit in silence—and to be held by God in that place—we will not succeed until we recognize how far we have to go to escape the grasp of endless sound and stimulation. We must recognize that just as there is a Kingdom of God and a kingdom of darkness, so, too, there is a kingdom of noise. [4] We need not be deceived by outright darkness; if our souls are numbed by an over-frenzied state of stimulation, it will be enough to keep us from ever fully claiming our adoption as sons and daughters of the Living God. This is precisely the bondage into which endless noise can place us.

Silence in spiritual life is so important simply because it creates space to engage the reality of God beyond the noise. Without such space—if we remain endlessly inundated by noise—life will quickly pass us by. Silence then, is the great gift to spiritual life. We must learn to practice silence, to carve out space for it, because in our world, we hardly ever find it without effort and intention.

[1] Qtd. on The Emotionally Healthy Spiritualty Blog, ‘Change Your Brain Through Silence and the Daily office,’ November 4th, 2014. http://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/change-your-brain-through-silence-and-the-daily-office/ (March 11, 2017)

[2] Nightingale, Florence. Notes On nursing: what it is, and what it is not. New York: Appleton; 1860. Qtd. in ‘Hospital Design and Noise: A Message from Florence Nightingale.’ http://info.soundofarchitecture.com/blog/hospital-design-and-noise-a-message-from-florence-nightingale#_ftn1 (March 13, 2017)

[3] Nautilus Magazine, Online, ‘This is Your Brain on Silence.’ August 24, 2014. http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/this-is-your-brain-on-silence (March 4, 2017)

[4] Cf. Mark 1:15, Ephesians 2:2