Let's Have a Little Silence, Please

Two weeks ago, early morning, at Quiet Rest, I sat on the catch-all box, on the porch, while still dark. I listened. Intentionally. Complete silence for fifteen to twenty minutes. It became a little disconcerting, wondering where life was outside my own when an outline of light formed the top of Schoolhouse Mountain to the east. Then a turkey near the fire pit stirred, scratched and began it’s chatter.  A woodpecker, chimed in. So when Gordon Hempton, an audio ecologist, who has traveled, measuring the decibels in hundreds of places throughout the world, says he can count on one hand the  places in the United States where you can sit for twenty minutes without hearing a generator, a plane, or some other mechanized sound, he must have been saying Quiet Rest is one of them. Just kidding! His reason for all his interesting work is to demonstrate by recording the sharp decline of sounds of nature. “I don't want the absence of sound," he told Diane Daniel, in her Ode Magazine article Listening is worship, "I want the absence of noise."  Adding, "Listening is worship."

I seem to think a little differently than most of the crowd I hang around with but I'm coming to think that maybe, just maybe, that Holy Week ought to begin a time of silence, a week of sitting in the dark with the jarring events from the triumphal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem to the march of Christ to the grave. Holy Week moves the world through the shouts of Palm Sunday to the empty space of Holy Saturday. In preparation for this week I'm seeing more clearly and loudly the Biblical record indicates it will end on the note of triumph and resurrection.  On the other hand, I recognize, more than ever, there is a great silence in between now and then. A great darkness I believe is necessary for me to sit with.  It’s reminds me of sitting with an actively dying person, alone, in silence.

 
I agree with Alen Lewis when writing in Between Cross and Resurrection, "Ironically, the center of the drama itself is an empty space. All the action and emotion, it seems, belong to two days only: despair and joy, dark and light, defeat and victory, the end and the beginning, evenly distributed in vivid contrast between what humanity did to Jesus on the first day and what God did for him on the third... [Yet] between the crucifying and the raising there is interposed a brief, inert void: a nonevent surely—only a time of waiting in which nothing of significance occurs and of which there is little to be said. It is rare to hear a sermon about Easter Saturday; for much of Christian history the day has found no place in liturgy and worship it could call its own."

I ask myself the question; Is this perhaps behind the reason I’m generally uncomfortable with silence, uncomforted by waiting. Have I not understood fully that a messiah who stands at the crossroads of an identity as a deliverer, a political hero who could fight with force for my salvation and that of a servant, a messiah who chooses intentional suffering, who chooses to walk me through darkness on the way to redemption? If Holy Week is filled with events that silence me in disbelief, Holy Saturday levels me with the silence and emptiness that is the end of God.

Yet, I am viewing Holy Week as a preparation of me precisely for this silence. For certainly, here, after the end of God on Easter Saturday, I’m not only going to find the absence of sound, the absence of noise, but the end of the world—confirming my despair and doubt, the fear that history is meaningless, that evil is in control, and my future perilous. Such silence is one in which I can only manage a redirected cry for "Hosanna," a reiterating of the lighthearted cheers of Palm Sunday, a desperate prayer for a Messiah to save me now, to deliver me from evil and emptiness.

I’ve confirmed this cry in the case of Willa.  She was a young adult who  was hospitalized and classified as schizophrenic of an undifferentiated type. She was born into a home where she was unwanted and abused. She was a bright child, but everyone took advantage of her such that she grew up with no sense of boundary or healthy relationships. Tragically, the very individuals who pledged to help her also became stories of abuse in her life. She was in the second year of graduate school when she finally broke down and could not finish her examinations.

In the hospital, she sat for hours rocking her doll and staring into space. The head nurse on the floor told Dr. Loder, that they expected Willa would never leave the hospital. One day, however, while she was sitting in her chair, someone came up behind her, put arms around her and said, "The silence is not empty; there is purpose for your life." She turned around, but there was no one there. The power of that experience began to build sanity, and to distinguish illusion from reality. While no one thought she would ever leave the hospital, she was released after three weeks. She was eventually baptized and returned to the profession for which she was training. Commenting on this encounter with God in the silence when all else seems lost, Loder in The Logic of the Spirit  writes: "The intimacy of the Spirit runs deeper than family violence and neglect, and has immense restorative power."

Father, God thank You for revealing to me that Your intimacy, truly, runs deeper than silence.  There is going to be much to listen for between today, Palm Sunday and especially after the crucifying and the raising.  Father, I am not ignoring the fact that after Easter Sunday there will also be much silence and darkness to sit with as well but it is and never will be fully empty.  Amen.