MEETING
GOD IN SILENCE

Topics: Contemplation; Listening; Meditation; Pleasure; Reflection; Silence

References: 1 Kings 19:9–13; Psalm 46:10

I read A Hole Is to Dig to my children when they were young. Each charmingly illustrated page declares the purpose of something: “A pile of leaves is to jump in; a mud puddle is to slide in and go ‘Oodlee-oddlee-oo!’ ” And so on.

The reasoning is sound if you’re a child. The world is made for our entertainment; it gives us things to do and pleasures to revel in. Reading the book as an adult, however, offers a more pragmatic perspective: like holes are something to fill in before someone trips and sues you, or piles of leaves are to be put into plastic bags before the Thursday pickup, or mud is to be scraped off boots before stepping on the carpet.

The same pragmatism that turns a tired and jaundiced eye toward holes and mud seems to inform the liturgy of many churches with regard to the purpose of silence. Silence, it seems, is something that must be filled.

Perhaps it would help us to hear more regularly the story of Elijah on Mount Horeb, waiting for the Lord to pass by. The Lord was not in the great wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but, as the NRSV translates it, in the “sound of sheer silence.”

The church’s long history of contemplative practice seems to suggest that there is some knowledge of God that can come only in stillness—a silence large and long and intentional enough to open a sacred space for the Holy One to enter.

—Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, “Silence Is to Dwell In,” Christianity Today (August 7, 2000)