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We underestimate the power of silence. Without a doubt.
I was at church the other night and the band was finishing up their last song at the end of the service, and usually at this point a song from a CD starts playing. But for some reason, as the band stopped playing, the CD track didn’t start and the transition was silent for a good 20 seconds. I mean, it was dead silent in a room of several hundred people. It was hilarious because the band members started to look at each other with this surprised anxiety and the people in the front row turned around to the sound desk to see what was going on, and I could just imagine the sound guy freaking out trying to figure out why the song wasn’t playing.
Heck it was awkward!
But why? Do we fear silence? I’d say with certainty that you’d be hard-pressed to find a church that practiced the art of silence. We seem to have a preoccupation with filling every moment of the church service with sound. The music is blaring, the preacher is yelling and there’s hardly a moment without background music. Coming to church ought to be a transformative experience, where we are challenged to face the reality of our own sin and brokenness and become vulnerable before God. According to Henri Nouwen, silence is the furnace in which the transformation of our false compulsive self is transformed into the new self of Jesus Christ.
I mean, look at our daily routine, in general we are very busy people and our days are full. There is seldom a period in which we don’t know what to do, and we move through life in such a distracted way that we don’t even take the time to rest and wonder if any of the things we think, say, or do are worth thinking, saying or doing. We simply go along with the many “musts” and “oughts” that have been handed to us. Our identity, our sense of self, is at stake. A false self becomes fabricated by social compulsions as we become dependent on the responses of our culture and the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. What matters is how we are perceived by the world.
Another thing about silence is that we are forced to face our own misery. Did you know that the top prescription drugs in the western world are anti-depressants? As we become fashioned by the compulsions of the world in the business and noisiness of life, our joy dies a slow death as we become conformed to the destructive patterns of our culture. Blaise Pascal said that we tend to be miserable, but we don’t like to think about being miserable, so we create diversions. We think about something else, we do something to take our minds off our own misery. Soren Kierkegaard said, “if I could prescribe one remedy for the human condition, I would assign every human being to sit alone in silence in their room so they can meditate on their misery.” What tends to happen is, we become unhappy, but rather than think about that, we just keep filling our lives, we do whatever it takes in order that we don’t have to think about it.
The church experience tends to be guilty of this. We can get so caught up in an experience that is fast-paced, loud and hyped up, drowning out our own misery and the desperate need to face our own sin. But let us take a moment and be silent, let us come to grips with our misery, our sin and our brokenness. We all face it, but we are afraid of becoming vulnerable. But if we can’t do that at church, then where can we do it? Its ok to be discouraged, its ok to have a hard week, its ok to be experiencing pain, but it doesn’t do anyone justice by coming along to a place where it can all be forgotten in the noise but only to resurface once you walk out the door of the church.
Henri Nouwen says that without solitude and silence we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Silence is about stripping away the music, the conversations with friends, the telephone calls, the meetings and the books so its just me: naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken – nothing. It is this nothingness that we have to face in our silence, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in us wants to run to our friends, our work, and our distractions so that we can forget our nothingness and make ourselves believe that we are worth something.
The confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ. We have to fashion silence into our every day lives and into our church experience in order to shake off our compulsions, and dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord. With such silence we will become increasingly conformed to Christ. Silence and solitude are the places of purification and transformation, the places of the great struggle and the great encounter. They are not simply a means to an end, they are their own end. Silence is the place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimising compulsions of the world.
Zephaniah 1:7 – “Be silent before the Lord God!”
Psalm 46:10 – “Be still and know that I am God…”
Proverbs 17:28 – “Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise…”
Ecclesiastes 3:7 – “A time to keep silence and a time to speak…”
To read more about silence, check out Henri Nouwen‘s book: “The Way of the Heart,” particularly the chapter on “Silence.”
Excellent work Maximus Wellius. Another well thought out, challenging blog. Keep them coming…