Silence
I don’t know if you have noticed, but silence is becoming less and less common.
It is a sad reality and I think we need to — for our own sanity — go back to silence and understand the benefits of it and how to practice it on a daily basis.
I love silence. It could be because I tend to be more introverted than extroverted, but there is something about silence that is just beautiful.
My wife and I try to go to Georgia once a month to visit family and I’m usually the one driving (I really enjoy driving on the interstate).
Most of the time we leave right after work and we talk for the first 30–50 minutes. After that my wife needs to rest and goes to sleep.
Though I love talking with my wife, I gotta say that my quiet time in the car is one of my favorite things.
I get to spend time thinking about different things as I am driving and to me it is a very gratifying thing to be in silence.
As I mentioned in the beginning, we live in an age that doesn’t have much silence. Noise is everywhere and somehow being silence is a lost art or sometimes seen as rude.
I have no problem in being in a room with someone and not talk. Not because I don’t like the person or anything like that, but I just don’t like talking the whole time.
I think it was my grandma that told me once, “There is a reason why you have two ears and one mouth… so you would speak less and listen more”.
There is so much truth in that sentence. We need to get better at just shutting up. Do it, it’s good for you… SHUT UP
Now, the purpose in writing this is to stir some thoughts in regards to silence in our own lives and the church context.
Recently I have been attempting to develop a discipline for contemplative prayer and meditation. I read a book about the monastic life (click here)and how much we can benefit from their practices in our every day life.
I really enjoyed the book and it challenges the perceptions we have about ancient traditions. We think that those ancient traditions, being ancient, don’t have much to offer to our “highly sophisticated and industrialised world”, but we are wrong.
There is so much wisdom to gain from many different religious traditions.
Throughout the book, I was encouraged to practice meditation and contemplation. The results have been revealing, to say the least.
Though I love silence, as I started to immerse myself in this practice (I’m still developing this new discipline) I realised that I’m actually not that good at being quiet.
Yes, I can be quiet on the outside, but man, there is so much going on in the inside. My brain doesn’t shut up. And it’s not like I’m extremely smart and I’m thinking difficult things and how to solve them. Far from that. My brain is going through mundane things.
Thoughts of what I need to do, what needs to be fixed in the house, what I need to buy, what can I write next, imaginary conversations, etc. All of that comes to mind as I’m trying to meditate, and just like that 30 minutes have gone by!!! 30 minutes!!!
It’s incredible how much noise there is inside our heads. The good thing though is that I’m learning to quiet my brain and not just that, I’m learning to ask myself why am I thinking what I’m thinking.
One of the many benefits of being quiet is introspection.
Introspection can be a scary thing. To examine our mental and emotional process can reveal things that we have not been paying attention to, however, when we do it with God it can have incredible benefits and positive change.
In my quiet times I’m learning to listen to my thoughts, to reflect on things I did and how I responded, and ask myself: why did I do that? In that, I’m inviting God to the mix, because at the end of the day God knows me far better than I will ever know myself.
I’m not going to lie. Many times there is no answer. Sometimes that is frustrating, but slowly I’m learning that growth comes in small steps and having a posture of silence is setting me up for God to show and reveal things in my life.
I believe that God wants to be involved in our lives and express His opinion. The problem is, we don’t give Him the opportunity to do that or we have misconceptions of who God is, that don’t allow us to get close to Him.
There is so much more that I need to learn from this practice, so as I keep growing in it I will write more about it. Right now I’m at the beginners stage.
Silence and the church
When it comes to silence and the church, I have witnessed that we are not good at teaching and exemplifying silence to the people.
We get to the auditorium and there is music playing to make the “atmosphere” ready. Then we jump into the worship set in which every time there is an inclination to be quiet someone shouts “alleluia”, “glory” or whatever other word they want to use, completely robbing silence. To top it all off, we have a misguided assumption that the higher and louder we finish a worship set, the stronger the “presence” is. What’s with that?
I know that right now I can sound very judgemental and cynical, but the purpose of this is to draw attention to what we do and how we are missing out on so much.
I have no problem with people shouting “alleluia” or “glory”. No problem with finishing the worship set in a loud way. But when that becomes the norm and that is the only way in which we somehow “encounter the Divine”, then I think we are heading in the wrong direction.
Most of the time, God and the Divine are found in the stillness, not in the loudness.
We have allowed noisiness to be the rule and whenever there is silence we feel awkward.
Next, the sermon starts and while the preacher is preaching we feel the urge to shout and clap. Once again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that at all, but there are plenty of times where we just need to sit in silence and meditate on what was just shared.
We don’t take the time to pause and reflect on the implications of what was just mentioned.
Here is a challenge: give up the urge to always shout, clap, or whatever that you do, and be willing to sit in silence, reflect, meditate and ponder.
One of the reasons I believe people don’t want that silence is because it pushes us to deal with our internal thoughts.
We are so desensitized with our inner person that we use noise as a drug to stay disconnected. We are scared to confront our inadequacies, shortcomings, fears, emotions, etc; on top of all that we have social media that exacerbates all of this.
No wonder we are experiencing high levels of stress, anxiety and depression. Noise is robbing our inner peace.
There is so much noise happening that we don’t listen and respond, but we hear and react.
If you are a pastor or worship leader reading this I want to respectfully challenge you to incorporate silence into your service. Not the 30 seconds to tick the box, but go for 3 minutes to start with. Let people encounter silence, feel the awkwardness and be in the Presence of God. Let God meet people in their fear of silence and see what can happen.
I have nothing to back this up, but I really believe that if we teach people how to be quiet, to listen to God, to be with their own thoughts, to reflect and meditate, we can see a drastic change in the levels of anxiety, stress and depression people experience.
Something happens when we shut up and let the Divine have its place.
I wonder what would happen if we flipped the church service around? If there were only two songs — where meditation is encouraged — and then read a portion of Scripture to then sit in silence and let God speak to us through it. What kind of results we will get?
Once again, I’m not saying we need to get rid of all the other things, but considering the noisiness we are all exposed to on a daily basis, it would be extremely beneficial to change things up and give space for silence.
Felipe.
