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.