When You are Afraid of Silence...

(as I spend the weekend on a silent retreat... I revisit these thoughts...)


In hushed morning, the snow falls, waking no one. I watch at the window. I watch and I have no language. Worship suffices.

And I realize: When I sit without words I embrace humility, bowing low.

When I choose silence I clearly communicate, speak to my own smallness: I do not have the right words.

Do I ever?





Maybe the right words always, only, come from elsewhere…. Outside of ourselves. From On High. Those Words aren’t heard when I’m prattling on. I’ll have to be quiet. The small still voice of God can easily be missed; silence is necessary if I’ll ever hear the Word of the Lord.

I’ll have to still too.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of Wind, Sand, and Stars, once turned to Anne Morrow Lindbergh and spoke uncommon words: "The great of the earth are those who leave silence and solitude around themselves, their work and their life, and let it ripen of its own accord."

In a loud world, it bears repeating: The great of the earth are those who leave silence and solitude around them.

Too often I don’t leave enough silence and solitude around the bits of my life. Things sour. It begs the question. If spiking a life with much noise spoils it, why not more silence? Why aren’t we willing to be alone?

Snow descends.

Is there not more silence in our lives because we are afraid?

Afraid that when we aren’t talking, aren’t connected, aren’t piping in on conversations around tables, water coolers, comment boxes, aren’t messaging or emailing …. that we don’t matter. That we will be forgotten.

That we’ll become invisible.

And maybe more than anything else, we want to be seen, known.

“This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible,” writes scholar William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle Review article, The End of Solitude.

“If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

This. I think on this: “the great contemporary terror of anonymity.” Is the whole of our lives this flailing, surging struggle against obscurity? That our worst fear is to be unknown. Not known as someone special, unique… better. That only when we are seen, and then, most importantly, valued … only then do we see our own worth.

Crystals of laced water, each one the only one like it, pile across the fields.

I think we fear aloneness only because we forget. We forget Who He is: "You are (El Roi) a God who sees” (Gen. 16:13). There is no such thing as anonymity. There is nothing to fear. El Roi, our God sees! What could be greater than this audience of One?

“[T]he eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth” (2 Chron. 16:9)…. so we can enter the solitude, listen to the deep, long silence --- and His whisper within --- without terror of invisibility. We are always visible, always known, always connected. To the Most High Himself.

His eye is on the sparrow, on the snowflake…. And I know He watches me.

Is His eye enough?

When it is, we see for the first time the true depth of our worth.

God sees me, and I am loved: His child, chosen and redeemed, bought with a price and free from condemnation, a citizen of heaven, called His friend, appointed to bear fruit. It is only in the silence, we are fully seen, that we hear Him serenading us to our real selves. … who we are in Christ.

If our true selves are only fully seen -- our own depths, the depth of who we are in Christ, only fully discovered – in hiddenness, hiding ourselves in Him…. should we not, in this culture of social media and connectivity, elevate the value of hiddenness?

To simply be small and hidden.

I type and winter white envelopes, powder buried upon powder, and the irony of this public musing is not lost on me. Here I make ‘net noise about being silent, step up to the cyber soapbox to wax about our hunger to be seen. Hypocrisy? I cringe. If I believe in silence and hiddeness, why scratch down bits of my life, plastering them up on the walls of cyberspace, creating even more visual racket?

I pause.

A bit of frozen lace catches on the window, slides down pane, melts.

Community is the normal hum of our experiences. We gather, we share, we listen, we learn, we serve. We are part of a Body. But maybe it is long silent beats, the God encounters, that gives us something of worth to say in the normative community circles.

So like a modern-day Moses, leaving the din of the masses to sit alone in the winds of a mountain top, we make regular times and places to hush all the inner and outer clamor and simply, bravely, wait for God’s voice. And then perhaps our reentry into community will too be with fresh words and “new tablets… [our faces] bright with the old truth.”

The words we speak must find their genesis from the silent places.

From His still small voice, that bread of heaven that comes down softly, soundless flakes of falling white.





Lord, fall fresh on me. I wait in the still.... Make me unafraid.



Related: We are Known
This week: a quiet string of reflective thoughts...
Photo: snow filling in our road, slowing the world down




a repost from the archives...
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