Inheritance, Week 6: Silence

Today is Palm Sunday, which is both the final Sunday in the season of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week. On Palm Sunday we recall Jesus making a dramatic entrance into Jerusalem, confronting the religious and political authorities with their own hypocrisy and abuse of power. Palm Sunday is usually celebrated with exuberant music and readings from the Bible describing that triumphant entry in Jerusalem. Today in the11:00 service, we’ll hear a choral cantata, telling that story in a series of musical pieces.  

In this service, though, I wanted to take some time to finish up our Lenten sermon series on spiritual practice. Over the last five weeks, I’ve talked about parts of what I think of as our Christian inheritance: these tools or techniques or practices that have been handed down to us through our tradition to help us live in greater awareness of God’s presence and Spirit. I’ve focused on those spiritual practices because I believe that’s the true purpose of Lent. Lent is intended to help us rely on God and be guided by God more fully in whatever we’re doing.  

So at the beginning of this series, I talked about worship as a spiritual practice. The second week, we looked at prayer, and the incredible diversity of ways to pray. The third Sunday of the series focused on fasting: how fasting isn’t just going without food, but abstaining from anything we feel we depend on, so we can realize in concrete terms how we are sustained by God. The past two Sundays, I talked about the practices of service and study: how in serving others and being served we often find ourselves meeting Christ, and how in study, in learning, we come to see that all truth is God’s truth and can help us know God better. Today, I want to finish the series by doing something that’s maybe a little paradoxical: I’m going to talk about the spiritual practice of silence.  

I know that might seem kind of strange, but to be fair I am in good company. Some of you may know the work of Thomas Merton, the monk who was also a bestselling author on Christian spiritual life. In 1965, three years before his death, Merton had become a hermit, meaning that he lived alone on the grounds of the monastery. And unless someone needed to talk to him personally about something in particular, he was alone and silent. I’ve always thought that must have been hard for him, because Merton was such a gifted writer and a wonderful conversationalist and he loved words. Some of his colleagues in the monastery noticed that silence was not Merton’s natural state. One of the other monks there said, “what little silence Merton knew, he spoke of very eloquently.” 

But it’s not just Merton. There’s always been a tension in Christian faith between words and silence. In the first few centuries of the faith, Christians were often misunderstood as some bizarre Jewish cult that worshiped a human being and talked about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. People thought Christians were crazy. (I guess you could argue some people still do.)  

So very early in the church, Christian leaders decided that we were going to be completely public about who we are. This is part of why Christianity does not have secret doctrines, or rituals that are only practiced with an inner circle of people. There’s no secret Christian handshake or magic password. At least partly, that’s because from the very beginning Christians realized we needed to say in plain language who we are and what we believe and how we try to live.  

This is also partly why there we have Christian creeds, like the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. Those are attempts to spell out and agree on the basics of Christianity so everybody can know what we believe. Of course later, as Christianity grew, the words of those creeds became litmus tests. They became weapons that allowed people to condemn and eliminate their enemies, often in hateful and brutal ways. Sadly, in some ways that’s still going on. So it’s not like the church’s record with words is all rainbows and unicorns and transparency. We’ve done some truly awful stuff arguing over words.  

But even so, from even before Christianity, in our Jewish heritage, there were always people who understood that God can never be known or summed up in words. There’s a wonderful writer on Christian spiritual life named Maggie Ross. She writes, “All serious speech about faith will resolve itself into silence.” Another way of saying this might be to say that all serious speech about faith must eventually fall silent before the mystery we’re trying to describe. If we don’t fall silent, we’re just babbling. We become what the author E.M. Forster called “poor, talkative little Christianity.” 

Now, I don’t mean to say that words about God are not important. They are. I love the Bible; I love the creeds; I love theology and church history and all of it. But in the end words don’t bring us into communion with God. They can help point the way toward God, and that’s great. But our words can become idols if we cling to them too tightly. And as faith talk falls silent, we need to quiet not only our speech, but the constant distraction of our inner chatter. And that takes practice. It takes time. Because I don’t know about you, but I can tell you my mind is always offering a helpful running commentary on almost everything.  

I think the scripture reading we just heard points to this idea about silence and deep encounter with God. It’s a story about the prophet Elijah, who’s running away from powerful people who are trying to kill him. So Elijah makes his way to Mount Sinai, which is also called Horeb – it’s the same mountain. Horeb is the place where Moses received the commandments; where God made a covenant with the people; it’s one of the holiest places in Jewish history. This is a place where people met God. So Elijah is there, hiding in a cave, when he hears what the author of First Kings calls “the word of the Lord.” And the word tells him to go and stand on the mountainside while God passes by. Elijah is standing on the same mountain, maybe even in the same place, that Moses stood to receive the commandments.  

And then comes a huge storm, so powerful it’s shattering rocks; then an earthquake, and then fire on the mountainside. Historically, all these things – wind, earthquake, fire; at other places in scripture, they’re all signs of God’s presence. They show up in Exodus, in Judges, in Psalms, in other prophets like Nahum and Habbakuk. When God shows up you see these events. But First Kings wants us to look deeper. After each one of these things happens, the author writes, “But God was not in the wind. God was not in the earthquake. God was not in the fire.” God inhabits what First Kings calls “sheer silence.” It’s only in that silence that Elijah can hear God’s voice.  

Years ago this friend of mine got to go down into a deep cave with a small group of people. Luckily, he said, they didn’t have to do any tight squeezes or technical moves; it was more or less just roping up and gradually making your way down this very deep shaft. Eventually, after a long climb down by the light of their helmets, they came to a kind of chamber, almost an underground room where the small group he was with could all sit down. The guide asked if they were comfortable turning off their lights and just sitting in silence for a few minutes. They all said they were, so one by one they switched off their headlamps.  

My friend said he had never in his life experienced darkness like that. He said there was no adjusting to it; it wasn’t like if you sat there long enough you could begin to make out the shapes of your group or the walls or anything else. It was a complete absence of light. There was nothing to be seen, because there was no light to see it by. But in telling that story, he said what surprised him was the same thing was not true for sound. No one talked. No one shifted around. But even though everyone was sitting completely still, when he moved his finger, it was loud. Then he realized he could hear his own heart beating. And then he noticed a high-pitched hum, that he said he later learned was the sound of his own nervous system. My friend had discovered something scientists learned about the middle of the 20th century when they built soundproof chambers: as long as there is someone listening, there’s always sound. There is no such thing as true physical silence.  

But I don’t think that’s the sheer silence that First Kings or other scriptures that mention keeping silent in God’s presence are talking about. They’re talking, I think, about an interior silence, a freedom from the mind’s constant chatter. And when the mind-chatter slows down and eventually falls away, God can be heard. That state of inner silence can be cultivated. It takes practice, but it’s absolutely part of our Christian inheritance.   

For example, one way to do it is the practice of what’s called Centering Prayer. In centering prayer, you choose a word or a scripture passage that draws your attention to God. Maybe the word is “grace,” or “love,” or maybe you use the passage from Psalm 46: “be still and know that I am God.” Then you just sit there in silence, and whenever you notice that your mind is wandering to the grocery list, or what you should have said in that argument the other day, or how you’ve got to return that book to the library, or whatever it is – when you notice yourself doing that, just gently repeat the word of phrase you’ve chosen to quiet the inner voice and draw your silent attention back to God. The sixteenth century Spanish writer John of the Cross says silence is God’s first language. In practices like Centering prayer, our souls are learning to speak that language. It takes a long time. Silence is a very simple language, it’s just incredibly difficult to speak fluently.  

I’ve talked before in sermons about Howard Thurman, who was genuinely a religious pioneer in this country. He was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentors and teachers in seminary. He went to India with a delegation of people to meet Gandhi, to learn about the possibility of nonviolent resistance as a way of working for equal rights in this country. He founded one of the first interracial faith communities here in the U.S. But all his ministry, as activist and political as it might have been, was grounded in prayer and silence. In one of his sermons, Thurman told the story of how as a seminary student in New York, he was walking home late one night, and he suddenly heard flowing water, but he couldn’t tell where it was. So the next day he asked one of his professors, and the Professor told him there was a canal running underneath the street. Normally Thurman was there in the daytime; when public transit was running, and cars were driving past, and the street was crowded. So Thurman had never heard it before. But late at night, when it was quiet, he could hear the water flowing.  

For Thurman, that became a metaphor for our inner life. All the stuff we’ve got going on mentally distracts us from God. God’s always right here with us; God’s spirit is always seeking communion with us. But we don’t notice. While we’re distracted, we can’t. As we gradually learn to still all that chatter, we hear the living water, flowing underneath it all. We learn to hear God in the silence of our hearts.