Moments of Silence

Moments of Silence--September 12, 2017

"Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home--Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him at a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great." [Job 2:11-13]

There is this old story told about Mother Teresa of Calcutta that says the famous nun was once asked in an interview, "When you pray, what do you say?" And her answer, supposedly, was, "Oh, I don't say anything--I listen."  The interviewer was intrigued, and followed up by asking, "All right then, when you pray, what does God say?" And without missing a beat, Teresa answers, "Oh, God listens, too."

To say that mercy moves us to listen does not necessarily mean that someone else has to be yammering on in the background for us to hear.  Sometimes what is most necessary is for us to listen to silence...and to share the silence knowingly.

They say that there is a word among the Yaghan-speaking people who live in Tierra del Fuego, spelled "Mamihlapinatapai" using English letters, whose meaning is something like, "that look across the table when two people are sharing an unspoken but private moment. When each knows the other understands and is in agreement with what is being expressed. An expressive and meaningful silence."  Maybe something like that is what Mother Teresa had in mind in her prayer life.

Maybe it is what Job's friends stumbled onto for the three verses of the book of Job that they were actually helpful.  They listened... and they simply shared the awareness, the heartache, the lament, of their dear friend whose life had come unglued.

We hear a lot in our day about having "moments of silence" to commemorate somber moments, and sometimes that is treated glibly, casually, like it is a waste.  It is easy, one has to admit, to turn an official "moment of silence" into a crass photo-op--for some poorly-polling politician to turn a moment of tragedy and grief into their own public relations moment.  It is easy to become disillusioned about those ceremonial, scripted "moments of silence," if you have seen them rushed through, or co-opted, or hijacked by people with their own agendas. 

But maybe there are indeed times, like Job's friends feel in their guts, when there are no words, but there is a need for listening.  There are times when a moment--or maybe a week--of silence is what we need to be listening for.  And perhaps in those times of listening in the silence, both our hearts and God's heart meet.

You may well have shared such a moment of silence yesterday as our nation marked the sixteenth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001.  And I suspect you know, too, what it is like in this now annual act of remembrance, what it is to feel that worry in the pit of your stomach, that anxiety of whether or not the official public speakers in such ceremonies will ruin the silence by taking it over and using it to push their own agendas.  You and I know what it is to share a silence, even a public silence, and for the quiet to feel like precisely the right thing... and to hope against hope that no one will break the silence prematurely and start in on their own soapbox.  You and I likely know what it is like, too, to be there at the funeral home, or in the church, or at the graveside, and to have someone blurt out some asinine platitude ("It's all part of the Plan..." or "God must have needed an extra angel..." or "Hang in there...") because they could not stand the absence of words.  (How does Walter Wangerin, Jr. put it? "We chirp theories like chickadees because ignorance is terrifying, and we need the noise.")

If you have lived through one of those times when words ruined the moment, you know what it is like to long to listen for silence... and to find that God is present in the silence as well as in speech.  Yes, ours is a faith that begins with God speaking creation into existence with a word: "Let there be light...", and yes, ours is a faith that is recorded and retold in words that we now bind in faux-leather and put on our coffee tables or bookshelves.  But the simple fact that God creates by a word is itself a reminder that God can be present in the silence before speech as well.  God had been there all along.  God was present, listening to the silence before the first "Let there be...", and God was present with Job and his friends in the silence on the ash heap, before those would-be comforters start blurting bad theology to try and explain away what can only be lamented.

The takeaway for us then, on a day like today, is how to allow silences to happen where they need to... and how to create space and time for silences rather than filling the air with our empty talk.  Who will you meet in this day that simply needs your presence and shared silence while they lament a loss, or grieve destruction, or feel their heart break over a world that feels like has come unglued?  Who will you meet in this day that doesn't need greeting-card sentimentality, or TV preacher bad theology, or any attempt at all to explain the unexplainable, but simply needs the space and time for "mamihlapinatapai"?  Who will you meet in this day that might share the listening-in-silence that your heart needs as well?  And how might you find in such moments the presence of the God who was there before the first words were ever spoken?

Let there be silence where you need it.

Let there be silence where someone else you meet today needs it.

Let your ears listen for God there, too.

Lord God... we are listening...