What is God's Rhythm?
"Some artists remain silent when asked to discuss their work because they’ve already expressed everything they want to say. Silence becomes a way of expressing what’s crucial.... Despite our more limited attention spans and sensory overloads today, our behavior patterns—our search for silence—haven’t changed.” Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
“We begin the day in silence because God should have the first word. We end the day in silence because God should have the last word.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why not a few abandon a contemplative practice like meditation as soon as it begins to expose this wound; they move on instead to some spiritual entertainment that will maintain distraction. Perhaps this is why the weak and wounded, who know very well the vulnerability of the human condition, often have an aptitude for discovering silence and can sense the wholeness and healing that ground this wound." Martin Laird
A loss of silence is as serious as a loss of memory and just as disorienting. Silence is, after all, the natural context from which we listen. Silence is also the natural context from which we speak. A culture that fills in our silences therefore disorients us, removing the frame, the background, the base of intelligibility for our listening and speaking.
How is silence our natural context? Alternating silence, speech, and silence is the very rhythm of God, as old and deep in the nature of things as creation itself.According to Genesis, God breaks the cosmic silence with a creative word, but He does this only during the days. At nightfall and on the Sabbath, God falls silent. Correspondingly, there is for us, the creatures of God, not only of work and rest, but also of sound and silence. “There is a time for everything,” says Ecclesiastes, “a time to be silent and a time to speak.”
. . . Saints listen for the sounds and silences of God. They quiet themselves into a kind of absorbency, a readiness to hear the Word of God, and also the voice of God, and even more the silences of God. The silences of God—mysterious, exasperating, consoling, pregnant with meaning—require our trust at least as much as does the Word of God. God does not talk all the time, and God’s silence is as emphatic as His speech. Hence the force of Jesus’ silence before Pilate. To be a faithful creature of God is to learn something of God’s rhythm of silence and sound and silence, to respect and trust it, and then to imitate God by speaking and listening from the context that is as old as the world.
**Adapted from an article by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., “Background Noise”.
Some ways to invite silence as a rhythm:
Refuse to have the last word
Turn off the radio in your car
Exercise without music or podcasts
Pause before speaking
Sit with someone who needs your presence, not your words
Make your first and last hours of the day in silence
JUDY