Silence in Noise

I wrote about Silence last week in response to a class and worship service I attended.  

This week in Sunday school, the moderator told us about a concert she attended.  The music was VERY MUCH not to her taste. She said that she discovered as she sat there, trying to block out the music, that silence was something you could find even when there is noise around you.

I thought that was interesting. I'm going to give it a try this week. Is silence something we can find even when the world around us is noisy?

Is that the only way to find silence? Is it always noisy around us?

Am I too dependent on the lack of sound to find silence?

Silence

I have been attending a class at my church about finding God through silence and starting conversations with God. It was taught (very well) by one of the college students who attends our church. Last summer, she spent some time in France at the Taize Community. Go read about it - it's fascinating.

Her class centered around helping us to understand some of the practices they use in the Community, especially music, silence, prayer, and study. The class culminated in a worship service.

Part of the service included several minutes of silence.  Have you tried to be silent? A few things I noticed:

1. It is hard to find a silent location. Noise is all around us.
2. It is hard to silent your mind. Let me rephrase. It is impossible to silent your mind.
3. The difficulty in finding silence is magnified in a room of people. 

I think silence - real silence - is something we rarely experience. Even right now, sitting at my desk, there isn't silence. No one near me is speaking, no television or radio is on, but cars drive by, the keyboard makes noise, people on the floor above me are walking around. When I'm looking for silence, I hear all of those things. Normally, I ignore them.  Silence amplifies.

My mind moves from one item to the next. I'm not sure this is bad - if I'm centered, I think God can move my mind from one thing to the right thing, but I"m never sure if that is the case.

Have you tried to experience silence? Have you been able to find silence? Does it bring you closer to God?  I may keep attempting it and see where it goes.

Perspectives: Quiet

Can you see the horns?

What would motivate a person to have all of these horns on his or her car? Why would you do that? I can't image that the owner of this car wants to move through life quietly.

Sometimes I hear myself talking and I wonder why I'm speaking at all. The situation calls for me to be quiet, and yet I keep speaking. Have you ever experienced that?

Sometimes what God is calling us to do is to serve quietly - so that no one notices us. At times our service should be all that another person sees. Sometimes our purpose is best served by saying nothing at all. Sometimes the best way we can love is to listen.

Where can you listen this week? Where can you serve quietly? 

Silence

Yesterday, in the meeting I was in, we participated together in "A Liturgy for Midday Prayer" before we broke for lunch.  (If you are interested, it is #13 in the Upper Room Worship Book.)  The liturgy begins with a time of silence.

I have noticed that silence is difficult for some, especially for those who lead community prayer.  A very short amount of time seems to be very long, resulting in brief quiet times of reflection before the leader  moves on to the next element of worship.  The time feels insufficient for me.

I liked what the leader of this time of worship did to prevent that rushing to speak; she asked a participate to set a 2 minute time period on his iPhone stopwatch, and asked him to break the silence when we had reached two minutes with the next element of worship, which was the Call to Prayer.

My impression of that quiet time of centering is that it positively effected the entire time of worship.  Those two minutes to be silent with God allowed us to enter into prayer and scripture reading with an openness and readying.  I hadn't thought of that before, but I commend it to you as a practice you might want to try.

Later that day, a person shared that he had had a conversation with a Quaker once, and had asked him, "How do you know when to speak in worship?"  The Quaker's answer was, "I speak when the impulse to do so is more powerful than all of my efforts to remain silent."

Graceful Silence

In the devotional I read today, Henri Nouwen said:

Moments of true compassion will remain engraved on our hearts as long as we live.  Often these are moments without words: moments of deep silence.

I was reminded of the book of Job.  When Job was in despair, his friends came and sat with him in silence.  For a while, they said nothing at all to him.   I imagine that must have been a comfort; to have friends who would sit in silence, not trying to fix anything, not giving advice, not seeking explanations, just being.

Job 2:11, 13 Now when Job’s three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. ....They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. 

It was when the friends started talking that things went downhill.

Silence can be uncomfortable.  I was trying to imagine this morning what it would be like if a friend came into my office and shared grief.  Would I be able to keep watch, sitting in silence, if that was what was needed?  I hope that I could.

Silence can be a gift, and it can be an act of compassion.  It's not the only way to respond, but it can be one choice of grace.

Silent Marks and Spaces

In the work I do, I work on the our Annual Report and quarterly newsletters.  Part of that means using the program InDesign, selecting and arranging images, placing text, and choosing fonts and colors for the design.  To work on improving the skills involved in this work, I'm reading a book called Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton.

In it, she shares this quote:

...although the alphabet represents sound, it cannot function without silent marks and spaces.  Jacques Derrida, French philosopher.

As a simple example of this, tryreadingthislinewithoutthespaces.  We need the silence of the space and the guidance of punctuation in order to effectively communicate.

In the book of Job, after so many terrible things happen to Job, his friends come to visit with him.  They sit with hiim in silence for days.  And then they started talking, and everything goes downhill. They communicated so much more support when they were silent.  (I say that facetiously, but I've always thought it was true.)

I'm not advocating that we never speak in support of friends, but I do think we need to realize the important of the space between the words.  There is a time to speak, and there is a time to listen.  To breath between our words.  To let go of what we might plan to say next, and to just be, listening.

In that silence, we may hear the words our friends need to say, and in the silence, we may hear the voice of God.