Hush: A Study of Silence
Today is my first day back from a short vacation. I took this last week off to give myself a break after the holiday. I love the Christmas season from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. The lights, the music, the parties. There’s A Lot, and I’m partial to all of it. Afterwards, my introvert self needs a little time to hibernate.
In the world of spirituality studies, there are two distinct practices that always come to mind when we make this transition from December to January. The Katophatic path, also called the Via Positiva and the Apophatic path, also called the Via Negativa.
The Katophatic path, the path of the Positive, is the one that has much. It begins with descriptions of God, defining and explaining the Divine, talking about all the ways God is good and powerful and present. The Katophatic path might have music and elaborate ritual, incense and readings. There are always a lot of words both sung and spoken often with explanations and exposition and symbols and metaphors packed into sermons that say interesting things, offering insight and ideas and food for brains to chew on. The Via Positiva. It’s what I call the spiritual path of The Stuff.
Apophatic spirituality or the Via Negativa, is the opposite. It’s the spiritual path of emptiness. Nothing. Silence. God is in the void. Indescribable. A whisper. The Quakers share an apophatic spiritual practice when they join together in silence on Sundays. Those who Sit as a Zen practice are also on an apophatic path. Sitting. Being. Listening. It’s a spirituality of desolation, calling us into the barren wilderness where we can rest un-assaulted.
Christmas feels like the ultimate time for kataphatic spirituality. There is So. Much. I don’t even mean Christmas as a day, but as a season, within which we also celebrate Hannukah, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, and which gets kicked off by Thanksgiving. Our shared national story and spiritual culture includes the constant playing of music, gathering of people, the added decorating found in every public and most private spaces. There are concerts and weekend trips and family. It’s a time to see people we haven’t seen, send and receive cards and year-end letters, to bake and visit neighbors. There are often special clothes to wear, traditions to abide, and gifts to dream and purchase and give. It’s a lot of stuff.
Then comes January, the time we shift into an apophatic pattern of quiet. Ice and cold conspire to keep us still, to move us indoors. The world gets smaller as outside space is less welcoming. Our loftiest goals are met with heavy sweaters, hot tea, and a good book.
The apophatic path feels natural in winter. It’s a gift of Earth. It’s the breath we take between the frolic of the holiday season and the new growth of the springtime. It’s an opportunity to renew our spirits through an emptying. The trees lose their leaves, the animals burrow in and go to sleep, and we, too, set ourselves for a time of semi-hibernation.
The silence feels right. It feels like the appropriate response to the world, the natural consequence of the holiday season.
Silence isn’t an absence. It’s not just that there are fewer words. Silence is healing, curative, restorative. It’s the starting point for us to recover our power.
Silence is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down and when we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the tidal wave of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and posts and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Silence is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.
Silence is the beginning of a conversation, the place from which truth can be formed. Silence is not an absence, not a hole to be filled; it is the necessary medium for clarity. And the truth silence brings is not intellectual; it’s a truth we know in our bodies, one that rests away from our brains wordlessly and ethereally. It’s a truth that comes from a deep place, one that can only be accessed after sinking into the quiet where the boundaries of self soften.
One of the places there are too many words is social media, a venue driven almost entirely by language. Because the national conversation is happening on Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads, they can be agenda of social change, terrifically effective places for community organizing and shifting moral norms, so, I try to be an active and visible presence. Most of the year, I engage a potential audience of more than two thousand people who follow me in a variety of conversations and strategies to shape the world in our vision of love. And, every January and July, I sign off. For two months each year, I silence the voices. I shut out those thousands of people to give silence more space in my life. I disconnect, disengage, disentangle myself for a little while from the world so that I can reconnect less with the masses and more with myself.
For those of you very connected on social media, I recommend this pattern. It is restorative. A full month living my life focused only on what’s in front of me and not on an imaginary Greek Chorus who might or might not like the pictures I post or my random thoughts for the day. Quieting the many voices around me gives room to the few voices. My voice. The voice of the trees. The divine voice. The voice of the wind. I need the quiet so I can hear.
My first real step into pastoral ministry happened when I knew, and accepted without judgement, that I had nothing to say. My training took place largely with runaway or what we called throwaway teens here in the city. That training was a lot about what to say, how to help move someone from crisis to a place where they can think clearly. How to help them process trauma enough to make a good next step. My real training happened, though, when I was first confronted by a woman howling in her pain, in her grief, a woman so overcome with loss that all she could do was kneel and beg god to make this nightmare go away. I knew then that words were meaningless. There is nothing to say. Real pastoral care begins with knowing there are no words.
Yet, it’s the reason so many people don’t show up when someone else is in pain. I hear it all the time. Someone didn’t call, didn’t visit, didn’t attend a funeral because they didn’t know what to say.
Speaking isn’t always the way we heal. Words are limiting and can trivialize those experiences that are too deep for language. Being present to someone else’s suffering without having to speak is true companionship. Tolerating the not curing, not knowing, not healing requires some humility, an acceptance that we are small in the face of anguish. But the failure of language is not all we have to offer.
Jewish scripture tells us the story of Job, a man who lost everything, whose grief was unbearable. Chapter 2, verses 11-13 read: When Job’s three friends heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud and they tore their robes and sprinkled their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for 7 days and 7 nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.
They sat on the ground for 7 days and no one spoke a word.
Silence itself is the healing balm.
I’m talking about silence as a powerful spiritual tool. I’m also aware that silence can be a powerful tool of oppression. Silencing is not a gift nor is it healing. When you are silenced by political or social moors, when your voice can’t be heard, when your experience isn’t recognized, when you’ve been erased by dominant culture, you’ve been silenced. When our government removes mention of LGBTQ protections from anti-discrimination guidelines, millions of people are silenced. When the talking heads on TV giving their opinions about the day’s events are all white, millions of people are erased. When subways are designed so only people with working legs can use them, millions of people are disappeared. When previously incarcerated people aren’t given a vote, millions of people are muted. When bathrooms are labeled for men or women, millions of people are forgotten. When I list ways people are marginalized in my sermons, but I forget the way you live differently in the world, you are also silenced.
Silence can be a wrench closing the opening where the steam can get out, used by people in power to keep the hissing noise down. It can become a weapon of dominance, wielded to ensure submission and irrelevance. Language is used in courtrooms and welfare offices and at child protection hearings to ensure the silence and continued existence of an underclass.
And silence can become the resistance, a non-participation in the language of oppression. A response to subjugation. A liberation rather than an accommodation. Sometimes we use silence because it’s the only response to a world of too many words, of violent words, of threatening and destructive words. Silence can be self-determination. When systems use language to oppress, our non-participation can utilize silence as an expression of sovereignty.
But, mostly, I’m talking about silence as a spiritual tool, the silence that brings us back to ourselves, back to the Source of our being, the single place where we are most authentically who we are. There’s a voice that has to be heard without language. It’s the healing silence we experience when we first walk in our doors after a busy day, when we take that first deep breath; or that magical silence after a hymn of shared faith is over, when the last word was sung, the final note played; or the meditative silence of standing in a field while it snows.
Wisdom is born in silence, in our ability to be present without ego-consciousness.
Faith is fostered in silence, by the willingness not to explain it all.
Relationships are developed in silence, on our ability to be present without a cure.
Community is encouraged by silence, by sharing the common experience of allowing the boundaries of self to soften.
Learning happens in silence when we accept that there might not be an answer.
Clarity is found in silence, as a gift given in gratitude.
We’ll close as we opened, with the words of the Irish poet: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
