A Silence Opens 

Hello, dear reader. Thank you for being here. This week maybe you have been involved in more conversations about racism, as I have. It is heartening to see what is being attended to in this moment. In other contexts I am moved to speak, but these days I am often met with my own silence. Nothing can get at the complicated stew of despair and guilt and shame and rage and longing for a more just and peaceful world in which every human being is valued equally and seen as God sees them.

A Silence Opens is the title of the brilliant Amy Clampitt’s 1994 collection. For the first time I see the word “opens” in both senses of the word. Not only does it refer to the quiet that can enlarge and grow around the (non)speaker, but to the silence that can crack something in us, can loosen or unlock capacities we may not have known were available, a further compassion we had not yet been ready for. Silence is the perfect and necessary condition for really listening: to others, to our still small inner voice, and to God. Sometimes we don’t hear anything back. But silence feels like a good posture for me right now. Listening for what God will do out of this whirlwind, and for my own marching orders. And being mindful not to take up too much airtime when it is truly others’ turn to speak.

The library books I checked out in February are finally coming due next week. I had the uncanny foresight to borrow a whole slew of them before the doors were closed, so I’ve been well supplied. Jericho Brown was in this stack, and I fell in love with the urgency and churchy splendor and raw emotion in his poems. Like this sonnet with its devastating final couplet. The tradition, indeed. He starts with the pastoral, the idyllic garden, and look where he ends up.

The Tradition 

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought

Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning

Names in heat, in elements classical

Philosophers said could change us. Star Gazer. 

Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will

Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter

On this planet than when our dead fathers

Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath. 

Men like me and my brothers filmed what we

Planted for proof we existed before

Too late, sped the video to see blossoms

Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems

Where the world ends, everything cut down.

John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.

There is good silence and bad silence, of course. I am hopeful we’re making small steps toward achieving a better balance. 

Funny how much more there is to say about silence! 

The book of Proverbs recommends it: “Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding.” 17:27 (ESV) 

And Paul Goodman says this, from Speaking and Language.

Nine Kinds of Silence

Not speaking and speaking are both 
human ways of being in the world, 
and there are kinds and grades of each. 

There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; 
the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; 
the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, 
whence emerge new thoughts; 
the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; 
the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; 
the silence of listening to another speak, catching 
the drift and helping him be clear; 
the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, 
loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; 
baffled silence;
the silence of peaceful accord with other persons 
or communion with the cosmos. 

What kind of silence are you dwelling in these days? 

Today I’m aiming for the “fertile silence of awareness.” How can we meet the divine, or the divine in our neighbor, if we talk too much? How can we learn something new if we are just loudly repeating what we already know? How can we hear any other voice if we are insistently talking over it?

Psalm 46:10 still says it best for me: Be still, and know that I am God.