Listening for the Silence

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven...a time to keep silence, and a time to speak." (Eccles. 3:1-7)

I have to admit that a lot of the time I don't feel that there's much silence in my life. So often, so many needs clamor for my attention! There are days that the phone seems to ring every time I try to start any job at all. The noise of TV, the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, the vacuum cleaner, the doorbell, and on and on. And when school's out each afternoon, it's "Mom, I need help with my homework," or "Mom, I need a new folder for my class" or "Mom, I'm starving - I can't wait til dinner!"

If God tries to talk to me, how can I hear him over all the noise? How I sometimes long for silence!

And yet there are times when I do have that silence, and my soul is uneasy because I can't feel God's presence at all. What is happening when we can't hear God? Is God then mute?

When persons lose their hearing, children still laugh, birds still sing. The loss of hearing means that one's ears no longer interpret the vibration of the sounds around them, not that the sounds themselves cease. Those persons out of necessity sometimes learn to compensate by developing other methods of "hearing."

When I can't hear God, I also must compensate, by holding on to my faith even when I can't feel Him or hear Him. What are we to think about those times that we can't hear God, when we feel alone and forsaken?

In the Winter, leaves are stripped from the trees, flowers die, grass turns brown. Birds fly away and animals go into hiding. But then something wonderful happens -- Spring comes. And we realize that winter comes, but it doesn't endure forever. So it is in our lives. We will certainly have times of loneliness or feeling forsaken, but they will not endure forever. God has promised never to abandon us. Those silences are like seeds and bulbs lying dormant in the earth, waiting for spring. As the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us, all of life has cycles and seasons. Faith gets us through the Winter of our lives, because we know that Spring will follow. Contentment comes with learning to weather all seasons, even those of doubt and silence.

Life is full of paradoxes. Birth is death from the womb. Death is birth into the hereafter. Jesus died so that we might live. Paradoxes seem to be separated by a thin curtain. Our perception depends on which side of that curtain we stand. If I walk from this room into the next one, you see me as leaving. But a person standing in that other room sees me as arriving.

A much-loved children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit, describes what many of us might consider ugly and reveals the beauty within. In a nursery scene, an old rocking horse, the Skin Horse, befriends a rather new and uncertain Rabbit. Their encounter goes like this:

The Skin Horse had lived in the nursery longer than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away. He knew that they were only toys and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

     "What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
     
     "Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

     "Does it hurt?"

     "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

     "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?" 

     "It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."


Well, if ugliness can be beauty, and leaving can be arriving, and dying is birth into another existence, is it possible that silence might even be hearing? Perhaps in some ways our souls hear best in silence.

When my girls were younger there were times I had to send them to their room to rest. They didn't usually like it and sometimes felt that I was shutting them out, but I knew that it was time they needed to rest and recharge. Can it be that God deals with us the same way? When we are feeling shut out, could God be allowing us to regenerate in quietness? Can what we perceive to be negative actually be positive?

I think the story of the Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse can speak to all of us. In order to become REAL, a conscious child of God, you and I may be asked to endure long silences that at first hold no meaning for us. The process may hurt sometimes. It may not happen all at once. We may have to "become" and it may take a long time. Maybe that's why becoming REAL doesn't happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Maybe, by the time we become REAL, most of our hair will be loved off, our eyes will drop out, and we will be loose in the joints and very shabby! But these things don't matter at all, because once we are REAL, we can't be ugly--except to people who don't understand.

So I hold on to the assurance that there is indeed a time and a purpose to everything.

Even silence.


(presented as a devotional to Sunset Presbyterian Church weekly prayer group, probably in late 1980s).