Silence, PLEASE!

Silent places are difficult to find.  I relish the moment when it is the first day of a vacation trip and I have found me seat on the airplane, the day’s sports section in hand, as I sit back and I hear nothing but the muted sound of the jet’s engine. Now they say that may change as they allow people to speak on mobile phones while in the air.  I cannot imagine the conversations and loud, shrill voices I will need to endure.  Profit-making for some business has persuaded the government that silence is not a safety feature needed at 30,000 feet.  Wait until the first physical attack happens caused by the woman trying to quiet her baby while the drunk man behind bellows to the ‘love of his life.” Maybe I will need to take up hunting. I am not a hunter, not because I oppose it, but because there are other things I prefer to fill the “hunting hours” of my life.  But many hunters I know tell me that as they take up their places today in their favorite trees the true success of the hunt has already happened…they have found silence.  The leaves fall. The critters crunch the underbrush. Peace is found in the quiet of the woods.  Now, what happens in the deer hunting cabin may be less quiet, but that is another story.

Simon and Garfunkel wondered about these Sounds of Silence, when the air is filled with “people talking without speaking/people hearing without listening.”  Prophetic words, don’t you think? Do we avoid silence because we need to make sound to prove our worth, to give life meaning? Or, do we fear silence, because of what we might hear in those sounds of silence. For people who pray, the constant challenge is not telling God what we want or need to say, but rather listening in the silence for God’s reply.  We fear the answer, perhaps.  We cannot fathom the silence of a God who speaks only when the time is right and when we can hear. So, we keep on talking, filling the silence with sound.  Thus my challenge to you: Find a silent place, and quietly mediate there for five minutes on this verse from Lynn Unger’s poem, Boundaries.

Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?