journey (part three): enduring the silence...

I am about to fly back to Abilene, Texas, to help my son drive home from his first year at university. There are somewhere between 1400 and 1500 miles of asphalt between Abilene and home. That’s a lot of time to be together. A lot of conversation. And a lot of silence for purposes of reflection, sleep (not the driver!) and just a sense of needing some mental space. I miss my son and I’m looking forward to it. I treasure these times.

I don’t think he’ll mind me sharing this (I hope). But when he was younger, he used to talk a lot. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I often didn’t hear what he said back then as he explored his way through his imagination by means of these one-sided conversations. My son creates wonderful fantasy stories in his head. And back stories. And languages. And environments and cultures and such. (And, as you may have noticed if you read his comment earlier, he’s a deep thinker and well-spoken. An honest assessment, I think!) It’s a wonderful gift that I hope will allow him some means of income in the future. But it was hard to listen. And he knew that. But he would say, “That’s okay, Dad. I know you’re not listening but I just have to say this.”

I thought of this last Sunday afternoon as Tone’s oldest son, Griffin, still a preschooler, manipulated his Power Ranger action figure through flips and various other gyrations from chair to chair in our worship center. And Griffin is an imaginative talker, too. He came up and explained all of what was going on to Tones and me. I lost the last half of the conversation. Didn’t understand his words and his thought process either one.

As he double-back-flipped his Power Ranger off on another adventure, Tones turned to me and asked something like, “Do you think God ever feels this way with us?”

We are a society that cannot stand silence. We even use noise to counteract other noise. If ever you doubt this, reassess your position the next time you pull up to a traffic signal next to some punk kid with head banger music blaring and with the bass rattling your lungs (and his trunk lid) through the $500 sub-woofer he’s mounted in his trunk. Tell me you don't turn up your stereo louder! Uh-huh....

Have you seen the new ad for Bose headphones? They were developed for those who spend time on airplanes who want to escape from a talkative neighbor and the sound of jet noise and the yipping lap dog whose owner keeps trying to set it down in her carry-on kennel during the red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale. They use sound to cancel out other sounds, usually background noise. But the escape is usually into loud music or some droning lecture recorded for posterity and burned onto a CD. Or, it’s books-on-CD where you can listen to your favorite author as you travel through the air or down the highway. Then there’s the iPod, complete with unassuming ear buds with the distinctive white wires hanging down and connecting with that technological marvel, a hard drive on steroids. Full of music or pictures or video clips or whatever you want to take with you. It’s big enough to hold a complete CD library. A big one.

It’s wonderful for long car trips. You never run out of something to listen to. Put it on shuffle mode and you’re set for a cross-the-USAmerica roundtrip. You’ll never be bored. And you’ll never hear the same song twice. It is the smallest and most impenetrable wall ever created. A wall of sound that holds people at a universe’s length.

Isn’t this true, also, of DVD players in minivans? No offense, parents. Just asking…..

Whatever happened to silence?

This is one reason I like the remote outdoors. When my son and I were in Alaska two summers back, we took the bus into Denali National Park where Mt. McKinley is located. (The locals call the mountain Denali, it’s native name.) The guidebook I read suggested that one get off the bus on the return trip, out in the middle of nowhere, and wait for half an hour for the next bus to arrive. During the 30 minutes of waiting, you could enjoy the sounds of silence that you can find nearly nowhere else in the world. I went up there expecting to do that, but I chickened out. When we got to Eilson Visitor’s Center some 60 miles into the park, the silence was still incredible. And frightening. Enough to convince me not to follow the guidebook's suggestion. (In part, I was afraid of not having room on the next bus. No way did I want to spend the night in Denali, stranded with the bears and moose and caribou and wolves!) All you heard was nature. No ambient sound of cars on freeways or trains screeching into town or forklifts moving pallets from this place to that… no unloading of trucks or train cars… no whine of electric transformers or fluorescent light bulbs… no sound of the refrigerator compressor kicking on and off… no sound of the automatic ice-maker dropping ice cubes into the nearly empty reservoir… or any of the rest of the 24-hour per day dull roar that dampens our existence.

Did you know that silence is an ancient Christian discipline? It is seldom practiced, however, in these days of frenetic searches for something to fill the time and sound and activity void. Because silence is hard to take.

I just spent a week in Bishop, California, on business. Stayed in a hotel. Did you know I didn’t even turn the television on? True, at night I fired up iTunes on my Powerbook as I was drifting off to sleep (City on a Hill songs, folks… good stuff!). But much of the time I spent with no radio, no television, no CD or iTunes music – nothing but silence. I am growing to love silence. Very much.

The truth is that often there is silence on the journey with God. Not our choice, but his. And often we fill it with chatter, non-stop chatter, about this care and that concern and this Power Ranger chasing Spiderman. And I have to wonder if Tones’ question isn’t very appropriate for us. Perhaps God is saying, “My child, if you would just shut up long enough, we could enjoy some silence together. Then, finally, you just might be able to hear me. Really! I’ve been waiting for you to shut up for a long time, to relieve yourself from the chatter addiction to the noise of life and Bible text systems and systematic theologies... and simply be with me in my presence.”

Do you think God may ever think that about us?

Anyone who has done any kind of backpacking knows that one does not have conversations with one’s neighbors when hiking up switchbacks on an uphill climb. Let’s face it. Much of our Christian walk is uphill. (Anyone want to dispute that?) Silence is preferred. But it's good to do the journey with someone else. And, hopefully, your journey is conducted with other Christians and other kinds of God-seekers. May you at least hear the collective crunch of your companions' footsteps on gravel.

But what do you do when you can hear an echo? When your voice is all you hear echoing off the ceiling, chattering away as you try to scatter the fearful ghosts of abandonment, loneliness and total irrelevance, as you hum (or more likely sing at the top of your lungs) a chase-the-ghosts-away graveyard song. Comedians call that silence “walking the room,” a euphemism for being so bad that people get up and leave. In cartoons it’s characterized by the sound of crickets. No one is listening, they say. That’s the conventional wisdom.

Perhaps Someone is listening. Perhaps Someone just wants us to shut up long enough to hear the echoes of God.

Our journey is not always on level ground, is it? If you’re traveling uphill right now, even with a group, perhaps it’s time to hear the rhythm of your collective footsteps… and God. In the silence.

On your journey this week, this month, this year, may God bless you with times of good, uncomfortable silence.

Grace and peace!

Owen