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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Gifts of Silence

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“Silence is golden” flashes across the theater screen just before a film begins. In other words: stop talking, listen to the film, and allow others to listen as well! Yet, for many used to the relentless noise in our lives, silence is far from golden. Silence is disruptive, even threatening to us. When I lost my husband several years ago, I was struck by how loud the silence had become in my own life. Days would go by without my having spoken audibly to anyone, save my two dogs.

Yet, I was far from without sound during this period of my life. I began to pay attention to all the sounds that made up my day to day existence. The din of traffic noise, airplanes, and nautical sounds from the harbor all made for a symphony of sound. Because I wasn’t speaking out loud to anyone, I was able to intentionally listen to a whole new world of natural sounds. I heard the wind in the trees, or the soft patter of my dogs’ feet as they walked across the hardwood floors. I listened for the distinctive sounds of a variety of birds as they went about foraging for food or calling for a mate. At the time, I didn’t realize how unique it was to be able to truly listen because I was by myself, nor would I have viewed it, as I now do, as a gift.

According to audio-ecologist, Gordon Hempton, it’s not easy to find silence in the modern world. “If a quiet place is one where you can listen for 15 minutes in daylight hours without hearing a human-created sound, there are no quiet places left in Europe. There are none east of the Mississippi River. And in the American West? Maybe 12.”(1) We live in a noisy world.

Of course, silence is not the absence of sound, and is very different from manufactured noise. Hempton continues, “For true silence is not noiselessness… silence is the complete absence of all audible mechanical vibrations, leaving only the sounds of nature at her most natural. Silence is the presence of everything, undisturbed.”(2) I remember one of these silent places Hempton describes. On a backpacking trip with my brother high in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington State, we heard no other human noise, except our own exhausted breathing, no bird or animal noises, only the trickling of a nearby brook and the gentle wind as it danced around us.

Being able to hear the sounds of nature is an unexpected and often rare gift in a world bombarded by artificial noise. Of course, it is often the case that noise serves as a distraction from truly listening. Perhaps fearful of listening to the tangled thoughts within me, I can often fill my days with the noise of constant movement and activity, so that I rarely pay attention, or tune my ears to the stirrings of my own heart and mind.

The ancient discipline of keeping silence, though not always as benevolent or delightful as attuning one’s ears to the natural world, was used for intentional listening; so that one’s deepest thoughts and feelings could be heard. Removing the distraction of external noise, one is able to ‘tune in’ to thoughts and emotions, questions and answers. Many thoughts that arise in silent spaces are ugly, distorted, and grave. Listening in silence exposes pretense and self-righteousness, falsehood, hypocrisy and self-importance. In that vast mountain range of truly listening, perspective is given. There is little room to hide.

Yet even listening to the thoughts of darkened hearts and minds provides an opportunity for reorganization and evaluation. It provides the opportunity for renewal. Quiet gifts of discernment, spaciousness, and grace arrive. Wisdom for a new direction in which to go, and more space for truly listening grow within. We may even hear the still, small voice of God. In one of his ancient songs, David reminded himself of the gifts of silence: “My soul wait in silence for God only; from God is my salvation….My soul wait in silence for God only, for my hope is from God. God is my rock and my salvation.”

Author Alan Jones has written that “silence, in the end, can become a healing and comforting experience.”(3) When we pay attention and listen, we open up space where we can meet with God. Unlike prayers where we do all the talking, Jones describes the listening posture of prayer as “a daily willingness to place ourselves on the threshold and wait there.” Indeed, he goes on to suggest that cultivating quiet and a practiced attunement becomes the time when we move from the agitated periphery of our lives, identifying with our lives without qualification or added information to simply a silent interior space.(4)

Paying attention in silence is not simply for the sake of listening to the often unheard sounds around us nor is it exclusively ascetically-motivated sensory deprivation. Instead, it is the tuning of hearts and minds to attend to sounds that truly matter. For the Christian, prayerful listening is the opportunity to attune our hearts to the voice of God. Indeed, a silent heart is often the only fitting response to the overwhelming holiness of God’s presence. As the ancient prophet wrote: But the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him.

Paying attention in silence creates space to listen to our lives and to listen for God to speak. It is a discipline for listening well in a very noisy world. The gospel writers often speak of Jesus removing himself from the noise of his day, and withdrawing to “lonely places” for prayer. Jesus understood the place of silence, paying attention to God’s voice by purposefully withdrawing and turning off the noise around him. The silence is often lonely, as I experienced after my husband’s death. And yet, unique gifts are given in the lonely, silent spaces, and the still, small voice of God can be heard.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Gordon Hempton as quoted by Kathleen Dean Moore, “In Search of Silence,” Utine Reader, March-April 2009.

(2) Julia Baird, “An Unquiet Nation,” Newsweek, January 27, 2010.

(3) Alan Jones, Soul Making (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1985), 62.

(4) Ibid.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Silent and Empty

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Gordon Hempton is of the opinion that you 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. (His estimation is all the more dreary for Europe.) As an audio ecologist, Hempton has traveled the world for more than twenty-five years searching for silence, measuring the decibels in hundreds of places, and recording the sharp decline of the sounds of nature. ”I don’t want the absence of sound,” he tells one interviewer of his search. “I want the absence of noise.”  Adding, “Listening is worship.”(1)

For the Christian church, Holy Week begins 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. Though the Christian story clearly and loudly ends on the note of triumph and resurrection, there is a great silence in between, a great darkness the church curiously believes it is necessary to sit with.

Writing of Holy Saturday, the day most marked with this silence, theology professor Alan Lewis says of the Christian story: ”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.”(2)

Perhaps this is because the world is generally uncomfortable with silence, uncomforted by waiting. And who can understand a messiah who stands at the crossroads of an identity as a deliverer, a political hero who could fight with force for our salvation and that of a servant, a messiah who chooses intentional suffering, who chooses to walk us through darkness on the way to redemption. If Holy Week is filled with events that silence all in disbelief, Holy Saturday levels us with the silence and emptiness that is the end of God.

Yet Holy Week attempts to prepare the world precisely for this silence. For certainly, here, after the end of God on Easter Saturday, we find not only the absence of sound, the absence of noise, but a vision of the world’s end—tipping the scales to despair and doubt, giving into suspicions that history is meaningless, evil in control, and our futures perilous. Such silence is one in which some 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 us now, to deliver us from this evil and emptiness, from our suspicions and fear.

Such is indeed the cry of the Christian.

Professor and psychologist James Loder tells of the case of Willa, 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 writes: “The intimacy of the Spirit runs deeper than family violence and neglect, and has immense restorative power.”(3) The intimacy of God—even unto death—runs deeper than silence.

This is the story Holy Week sets before the world this week. There is much to listen for in between the crucifying and the raising. There is always much silence and darkness to sit with, but we are amiss to call it empty.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Diane Daniel, “Listening is worship,” Ode Magazine, July 2008.

(2) Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection:  A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 1.

(3) Story as told by James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 264-265.