“Hearing
the Silence”
I Kings 19:11-13
First Presbyterian
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I can talk about my
father-in-law this evening because he is not here.
He has returned to his winter habitation in
Silence is like that.
It is a sign of our discomfort with ourselves and with God that we fill
our lives so full of words and busyness. It
is an awkward thing for me to admit, I who live by words, but there is little I
can say to you, or that anyone can say for that matter, that is as good or
helpful or life-giving as what you can hear within your own life in silence.
When, as increasingly we are doing, we design our worship here with
islands of silence in the midst of it, it is not because we expect mountains to
move in your life in those few minutes as much as we hope it will convey our
insistence of its importance. Just
as I do not look to the hour of worship on Sunday to be our primary time for
experiencing God but rather our training time so that we are able to be more
open to the sacred in all of the other hours of the week, so, too, our brief
times of silence in worship are meant to be suggestive of a practice of more
substantial silent periods within our daily lives.
I love this poem by Mary Oliver
that she entitles Praying.
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
The “other voice” you hear
speaking to you in the silence may well be your own.
It is often in silence that we re-collect our lives and come face to face
with ourselves (which, ironically and sadly, is also a reason why some people
are so uncomfortable with silence). The
voice you hear in the silence may be the voice of your own true self that you do
not hear very often given the noise and din of the world and the myriad voices
vying constantly for your attention and allegiance.
Or the voice you hear in the silence may be God’s.
Truth to tell, in the deep silence, our own voice and the voice of God
may be indistinguishable for, as Jesus, who himself often sought silence, says, “the
kingdom of God is within us” and it is in the silence that we both find
God and are found by God in the mystic, sweet communion of life, in the oneness
of everything. It is where, in
In
the story we read earlier from 1 Kings, we find that Elijah is in mortal danger.
He explains his predicament to God by saying that he has been very
zealous on God’s behalf because the Israelites have been forsaking their
covenant with God; they have been desecrating the altars at which God is
worshiped; and they have killed God’s prophets until only Elijah is left to
speak and act on God’s behalf, and so the Israelites are after him, too.
God tells Elijah to go and stand on the mountain, for God is about to
come near.
Then there
was a great wind, so strong that
it was
splitting mountains and breaking rocks
in
pieces…but the Lord was not in the wind;
and after the
wind an earthquake, but the
Lord was not in
the earthquake; and after
the earthquake a
fire, but the Lord was not
in the fire; and
after the fire a sound of sheer
silence.
When Elijah heard the silence, he
wrapped his face
in his mantle and went out
and stood at the
entrance to the cave and then
there came to
him a voice…”
In
our “aging and saging” group this week, we talked a quite a while about
meditation, the cultivated practice of silence.
If the power was given to me to bestow on each of you one gift, it would
not be a million dollars, it would not be a vacation home in the
But,
wonderful as those benefits are, they are not why I commend meditation or the
practice of cultivating sheer silence. I
commend it because in the silence, and over time, we not only come to ourselves,
we not only get re-membered, put together again, but we drink of that great
underground River we call God from which human beings of every religious
tradition and no tradition all drink. It
is in the sheer silence of our lives that we can experience the palpable
presence of God, sacred solidarity with all life, peace that passes all
understanding, and, so imperative for our world today, peace that leads to
understanding.
May
it be so for you, and for us all.(3)
Amen.
(1)
I do
recognize that there are those who, living alone in circumstances of
bereavement, rue the daily silence that is not of their own choosing.
The silence about which I am talking is a practiced silence one chooses
to cultivate.
(2)
Excerpted from Meditation as Medicine by Dharma Singh Khalsa,
M.D., and Cameron Stauth, Pocket Books, 2001, as cited by Ted Phelps on his
website on Natural Meditation: www.natural-meditation.org
This website also provides a wonderful guide to beginning a personal
practice of meditation.
(3)
Just prior to the benediction at this worship service, I said words to
the effect of, “Whenever I am tempted to think of the practice of sheer
silence as selfish, given the hurting and broken world in which we live and into
which we are sent by the gospel, I am reminded of the example of Jesus of whom
our scripture says in several places, ‘He withdrew for a while.’
I also recall the guidance of the Russian mystics who say that if we
truly love the world we shall leave it for a while, so that when we come back to
it we may bring with us freshness, renewed vision and commitment, compassion,
and love.” The practice of
meditation is not an escape from the world but one of the means by which we may
more fully engage it.
© 2007 First Presbyterian Church