From the Silence, Speak

I forgot the wisdom
of the poem is silent wisdom,
the space between letter
and letter.

-from I Forgot by Arnon Levy

Max Picard in The World of Silence says of the Hebrew language that its architecture is vertical. “Each word sinks down vertically column-wise into the sentence. In languages today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentences become dynamic.” His next statement is a piercing metaphor for most of our lives today, “Every word and every sentence speeds on quickly to the next. Each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence, and moves on more to the next word in front of it than to the silence…”

The same could be said of our lives. The same could also be said too often of those who speak for or to us, our pastors, our talk-show hosts, our news anchors, our politicians.

In the recent elections, how do we know who is who? Who stands where? How do we know when all we hear in the media is what this one says about that and what this one thinks about that one. Everyone speaks, and everyone speaks loudly, clamoring for attention and votes, and so no one is heard. It is like the clanking and clattering of dishes shattering on the floor of a restaurant by an overwhelmed waiter spilling his server tray that deafens friends, even if temporarily, to the conversation they went there to seek. Why is it that a quiet beachfront picnic or an evening over candlelight is more romantic for two in love than a night out at a carnival or a club? It is because there is silence, and in that silence each can hear the heartbeat of the other.

No wonder God often speaks in a whisper, and that in the deafening crowd of the streets no one will hear Him (Matthew 12:19).

Henry David Thoreau said it well. The more we are deafened by the drone and buzz of the noise around us, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post office [or to check our email],” but “the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while…. Read not The Times,” he finishes, “read The Eternities!” Dallas Willard summarizes Thoreau’s thoughts by stating that “conversation degenerates into mere gossip and those we meet can only talk of what they heard from someone else.” While I’m not sure I wholeheartedly agree with Eleanor Roosevelt’s thought that “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people,” it is true that the mind and the heart itself withers by the constant sounds around and eventually almost entirely disappears, swallowed up by the life, or what we perceive as life, happening in a maddening speed around us.

James warned us to be slow to speak (James 1:19), and I think this is why. It must be from the silence and what we encounter there that words are formed in us – the tragedy of that silence and the weight of it, and the comedy that ensues when we actually hear from God, and the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping reality of what it is He actually tells us.

The Israeli poet Yona Wallach wrote to “Let the words work on you… they'll enter you, they'll come inside… let the words act on you, do with you as they wish.” We would do well to remember that is was out of the Word that Jesus came to dwell among us (John 1:1), a Word that the world didn’t recognize (John 1:10).

And how could it? The days of Jesus were tumultuous ones, no less so than in our present Western, modernistic society. It was only those willing to be done with the grasping to be heard and actually walk with Jesus who would later have the authority to speak, whose words would echo and reverberate from the empty hearts of millions that would follow in the centuries to come. No wonder the Psalmist tells us to “be still and know that I am God” (46:10), using for the word “still” one that means to sink down, to leave alone, to withdraw.

Last week God brought me to Mort Walker trail, a path that meanders through some woodlands in a conservation area not far from where I work. While there, I wrote this in my journal:

I am seeking the presence of the Father more immediate and intimate than I normally experience day-to-day within the noise and busyness of life. It’s in the silence that I am given “ears to hear,” as I have asked Jesus to give me, and the solitude beckons me into the secret place with Him. It always has.

I feel like He had this prepared for me like a secret picnic, a “table prepared for me in the presence of my enemies.” And here, in the deepest gratitude, surrounded by groaning creation as a reminder of what is to come – the feast of the wedding day – I eat. I dine. I linger here with the Wild Lover who wants me not to have him but to be haved by Him, who desires not that I possess but that I be possessed – with Him, with His life – and insobeing remain in Him and He in me.

If I am to speak, then it will be from that place and from that place alone. For it is the place of love, and the Source and Fount of my life.

Mountaintop Intimacy

Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Lookin’ back, I see the lead of love.
-Caedmon’s Call

I can’t tell you why, but I have always been bothered by the phrase “mountaintop experience” when referring to an intimate time of communion with the Lord. It always feels so… isolated, so estranged from everyday reality, as if you have to somehow climb a mountain in order to be with God or experience His presence. It makes me think of the Johnny Hart’s B.C. comic strip, in which the main character ascends a large mountain and arrives at the top breathless. Waiting for him is a man of wisdom who gives him some sage advice to take back down the mountain with him, which he will use when he enters back into his “real life.”

The phrase comes, I suppose, from Moses’ experience with God on the mountain face of the Sinai, where He gave to him the commandments. It was a wild experience for Moses, where the Mount was covered with smoke “and the Lord descended on it in fire” (Exodus 19:18). But it was isolated. It was a once-in-a-lifetime gig. And, although Moses and the Lord would speak face-to-face “as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33:11), it was not constant. Moses, in fact, had to ascend the mountain several times in order to meet with God, and there the Lord would command him what to say to the Israelites, even at one point commanding that Moses bring Aaron back up with him on his next trip up the mountain (Exodus 19:24).

This is what bothers me most about using the phrase to refer to an intimate time with God. It’s used often when speaking about a seminar or a church service or a time of worship. Coming back from a Christian conference, a friend of mine commented that he will now have to “come down off the mountain.” A popular contemporary Christian music group sings, “When I climb down the mountain and get back to my life,” signifying the intimate time with the Lord as something that is sought or experienced apart from everyday life.

Back on March 30th, 2004, I wrote this in my journal: [A friend] told me how he saw me as someone who always sought the mountaintop and didn't live well in reality. I take that seriously, Lord God - because if anything, I want to live in Reality, in light of the Really Real, in the Kingdom of the Real, not in the illusions. Ever since our conversation I've been asking you what validity, if any, there was to such an observation...

Yesterday, two-and-a-half years later, the Lord God answered me.

Three things are going on at the same time. First, I'm facilitating a study this week that prompted me to go back through and explore my journals, where I found this entry from March 2004 and remembered the conversation and question I brought to God. Second, I've been in recent "conversations" again with this same friend. I use the term conversations loosely, since they are riddled with accusation and fear and belligerence. But I want him. I want his heart. I want to hold him to the truth in love. And the third thing that happened yesterday is that I read one of Kendall's blog posts called "CloSe, Hard." In it, he essentially says that with the arrival of Jesus on the scene, the kind of life we get to live, the kind of life we have permission now to live, is , in effect, a constant "mountaintop experience" (meaning up close, intimate, personal) with God. This concerns Jesus’ words to the crowd in John 6, when he tells them that his flesh is the bread, and that “if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Here, here’s what Kendall wrote:

What if what is so "hard" about the teaching isn't about eating flesh or drinking blood? What if what is so "hard" is that Jesus is saying, "Yeah, that time in the wilderness with the manna and the quail? The whole Pillar of Fire and Column of Smoke being so uncomfortably close to you? The reality of God asking you to trust against all odds, even when the necessities in life run dry? Well, you ain't seen nuthin yet." What if Jesus was saying something like, "I want to be closer to you than I even was back then?"

Kendall continues,

Again, I am reminded that the Israelites seemed to asks for less and less direct interaction with God as time went by. It started mano-y-mano. It eventually became an isolated room in a temple that only a few guys could talk to, with a rope around their waste. Then there was a "silence."

Then, he concludes,

So, Jesus shows up and does some pretty cool things with fish and bread to get their attention. Then he lays it on them that the kind of life God wants is one that is up-close again, only not isolated to a wilderness experience; he wants it in the everyday. He says, "if you eat…I will come and make my home in you." Not just pitch a tent near by, but actually move in.

Through Kendall, God has spoken directly and in no uncertain words to my delimma. In fact, Jesus already addressed it with his invitation in John 6 to "eat and drink." Continuing from the March 30th '04 journal entry,

Why shouldn't I want the mountaintop?? Why shouldn't I want to behold the glory and splendor of my God?? If I am accused of wanting the mountaintop view, perhaps I am really being accused of having too much desire... an accusation I take delightfully. Open me up, though, Jesus, to more desire!

Amen. More desire, Jesus. This is your invitation and your desire. You have come to make your home in me now and forever. The glory of God has come. We no longer need the mountain. We need You. I eat. I drink. Make your home in me.

Welcome to Nowata

My wife and I used to make a circuitous route from the town in Oklahoma where we lived to visit family in southern Missouri. Each time, we would pass through a particular town that stood out among the rest only because there was nothing about it that made it particularly interesting. There was nothing of it that would catch the eye.

It’s a no-man’s town, a place where now only a few remain after the farming and timber boom of the early 20th century died down. Struggling ma-and-pa shops find themselves next to long-abandoned warehouses and boarded-up structures. Houses seem old – not so much as in age, because you think that they could be made new again, antique and classic even, but rather in soul, as if the owners, if they exist at all, have long ago given up on strong look of solid brick and the clean curves of Doric columns and the fresh feeling of gardens and cut grass.

I remember a gas station on a corner. It remains open only because there is still a road that makes its long stretch between real destinations right through the town’s middle – still keeping the town alive but oddly lifeless, like the spinal cord of a quadriplegic. Its name was given to it at its birth, some 120 years ago, and its Indian ancestry has spiritual roots, and I laugh every time I hear it: Nowata. It’s prophetic, I think. We make jokes, matching its name with another Oklahoma town, “Don’t slip on Nowata, Eufala down.” but they never quite fit right, like mocking the homeless or shaming the sinner. It was only later that we learned the name was a mispronouncement of a Delaware word meaning “come here” or “welcome.” Welcome… to what?

We would zigzag through its heart as we glimpsed the occasional American flag in a front yard, a faded and dented stop sign marking its center, an old railroad track reminding us of its vital days when the St. Louis & Iron Mountain Railroad Company extended its line down from Coffeyville through Nowata County and on south to Fort Smith, Arkansas, shipping cattle and farming supplies between three states, straight through the heart of Indian Territory. And, ironically, the town thrived precisely because there was an abundance of water from the Verdigris River that fed the abundant prairie grasses with much-needed nutrients. That, and the discovery of oil a hundred years ago.

But what had happened since? What’s its true story? How did it find itself where it now is, and what kind of summer would have to blow in to revive the trees, to clean the streets and alleyways of debris, to caress and invite green life into bloom, bleach the buildings, intoxicate the people? What kind of wild wind and strong storm could sweep the place clean of weariness, of days upon days of hot Oklahoma-sun dreariness, and revitalize its soul from a long, dry drought? Are they ready for a storm like that?

Am I?

One Good Memory

And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.
-Alyosha, The Brothers Karamazov

I love this line. As the “hero” of the story, Aloysha is the moral and relational center of the novel, and Dostoevsky considers his way of life the way of the heart in relationship to Christ and centered in His life. And Aloysha could not have been more right in stating that “good memory” may serve one day for our salvation.

It is memory that Jesus speaks to in these days through his Spirit. It is recognition. Remember that right before Jesus left he said that the Father would send the Holy Spirit in his name who would teach us all things and remind us of everything that Jesus said to us.

C.S. Lewis was right to understand that we need more to be reminded than instructed. He was not only speaking to believers by the way. Yes, those of us granted a new heart that now beats very much in rhythm with the heart of Christ will be compelled to follow Him simply by memory of where He has gone and what He has spoken to us. Have you ever noticed a bead of water on the windshield during a rain shower will usually fall in line with the one that went before it, forming a kind of wet trail on the glass? This is what Lewis meant. We have not yet tread where Jesus has gone, at least not fully, as there is always more – more depth to explore and more vistas with God to enjoy. But there is a memory of that life, an imprint, a path, a trail. And it is the work of the Spirit to bring us into it.

But Lewis was speaking also to unbelievers there (in “Mere Christianity”), and actually he did not try to make much of a distinction between the two. This is the reality that Lewis knew, that the human heart itself, wicked or not, deceived or not, was made in the image of the Living God. There is a kind of memory there of another life, or at least some better life, than the one we have. It is often only a phantom pain of something better, like the pain in the “hand” of a man who has lost his arm. But it is still poignant. Just take a look around. Almost everyone you see is engaged in a struggle to make their lives better. We want an increase in pay, or a better-fitting career. We often think that children will make our lives better or happier, or maybe moving to a new city or trying out a new wardrobe or a new kind of drug. And this is not just the American Way. I have been to the remotest villages in Africa and have seen the same. It is something intrinsic in the human soul. We know life as it should be, and we do not have it.

That is the dilemma – that somewhere deep inside we know life as it should be, or at the very least we know that somehow this isn’t the life we were meant to have. Not all of us have arrived at that realization yet, but we will. It’s a guarantee that nothing we use to delude ourselves against that reality will last long. Almost everyone you see is in the struggle to have it. The greatest tragedy, however, is in thinking that we can secure it for ourselves. Didn’t Jesus say that this would never work? “If you seek to save [secure for yourself] your life, you will lose it.” (Matthew 16:25)

So what do you do? What do you do with the thought that this life is not the life you were meant to have, that you were meant to live? What do you do with the fact that we are haunted by eternity, and to make it worse, there is nothing we can do to get there. We cannot sneak our way back into Eden, though we would sell our souls if it meant we could.

If you let that sink in and if you left it there, then it would lead you to despair, then cynicism, then despondency, and finally to madness. Some have gone that way. Think of Nietzsche and his philosophy of nihilism, which states that there is no objective meaning or purpose to our existence. Secretly, this view is held despairingly by many.

But there is another way. It is the Way of Jesus…