Silence. . .

Our presumption is that when the Church is silent, devoid of conversation or laughter or movement, it is empty.  I admit that I once thought such foolishness.  I had been taken in by those who insist that our life together be manifest in the vibrant give and take of people speaking out loud and loudly of all things.  We all seem to have taken it to heart.  Churches have become rather noisy places.  You hear the sound of texts and outrageous rings of our cell phones.  Organists play louder to let people know it is time to shut up and people speak more loudly as if to compete with the organ.  In either case, there is little room for silence.

When the Church is silent, it is not because it is cold or empty but because there is going on within that silence the ministry of prayer.  Could it be that we are uncomfortable with silence precisely because we are ill at ease with prayer?  Our lives are noisy because we are not sure what to do with silence.  When we get home we turn on music or the TV so that there is the sound of something.  We wear our earbuds all the time because silence has become almost unbearable to us.  We listen to podcasts as background noise and it could be old episodes of Andy Griffith or our favorite Christian commentator but it is noise to fill the silence that feels odd to us. Could it be that reading has become less popular in part because it involves silence -- words that live not upon our lips but in our minds?  I guess we would all prefer noise to the sound of silence.

Perhaps we will never recover an ease with silence again.  Noise has so firmly been entrenched in our minds and lives that we need it.  When I go to my hometown in Nebraska, I am struck by how silent it is compared to the small city where I live.  There are no sirens or speakers pumping out what passes for music or motorcycles tearing up the boulevards.  There is the sound of the wind or rain or nothing really at all.  At first it seems weird but then it feels exactly right.  I have to learn to be comfortable with silence again.  Once I learn that, the noise is ever more obvious.  As a boy growing up my dad would take advantage of the silence in the morning hours before everyone awoke.  He sat in his chair with Bible, Portals of Prayer, catechism, and Book of Concord open and he prayed.  Sometimes I got up early to sit on the steps and watch him.  It seemed so serene and profound.  It was.  It is.

As I grow older I hope to recapture the sense of silence.  I will trade an office filled with banter and keyboards and conversations for the quiet of a house and its ordinary rhythms.  Some of them involve words and some do not.  Some involve sounds and some do not.  It will be a welcome reunion with the peace of silence which is not empty at all.  When that happens, I hope also to learn again to pray without ceasing, to pray the words of Scripture and catechism, to pray the hymns and the Divine Service, and to pray from prayerbook and breviary.  When I find my peace with silence and discover again that it is not empty but full of the sound of God, then I will also learn again the joy of the Psalmist:

“And I shall go in unto the altar of God.”
“To God, who gives joy to my youth.”