Shhhhh! (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this blog series, we talked about all the noise created in our world today and all the many different forms it arrives to us in.  We live in a world that is fuller of words than it has ever been in the past.  If you would like to read Part 1 of this blog, you can read it here.What do we do about all the words that bombard our lives each day?   How do we manage our way through this world of so much speech?  The Biblical prescription is meditation and silence.  As one person noted, when Mary witnessed the shepherds worshiping her child, she didn’t tweet about it or blog.  Rather, she “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).  Of course, that shouldn’t surprise us.  It’s not simply that Mary lived in a pre-Internet age.  Rather, as a devout Jew, she understood God’s claim on her attention, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Palms 46:10).  Mary understood the discipline of mediation and the stillness and quietness that meditation requires. But our world seems uncomfortable with silence. Notice how many bars and restaurants fill the silent space with music or sportscasts that make conversation somewhere between difficult to impossible. But even when we leave the restaurant, who’s responsible for the fact we’re surfing the Net or plugged into our iPods or both simultaneously? Marilyn McEntyre reminds us that, “The silence we practice is one fairly reliable measure of the distance between effective words and ineffectual babble…without silence, language becomes noise.” There is a price to pay for life in a noisy world if we are not careful. So there is, then, the critical need for silence in a wordy (and noisy) world – space made for reflection; a pause that allows us to seek deeper meaning; opportunity to become more aware of our world; a quest to discover more intimacy with God. This is not about a life-style preference but a matter that goes to the heart of human existence. Isaiah reminds the people of God, “This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it’” (Isaiah 35:10).  Our resistance to seeking sanctuaries of silence may betray more than being caught in a cultural moment.  It may betray a deep spiritual crisis within. Just as we must grow patterns of work and rest that demonstrate to the world that we are not slaves but free sons of the living God, so we develop patterns of speaking and being still – Sabbaths for our mouths – which demonstrate that in Jesus, who is the Eternal word, we are free to be quiet in order to speak words that really matter. Sometimes much more can be gained from just being quiet.  For some of us that is more difficult than others.  It is just something we must teach ourselves how to do.  The rewards for doing so can be very great.

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