The Sound of Silence

About six years ago I took myself away for a few days to do some thinking about the future. I was beginning to think about moving on from my work as a Community Minister in Glasgow but wanted to sort through the reasons for that and make sure I was making the right decision in the right way.

So I took myself off to a wee house in the mountains with a couple of books and spent some time going back to basics and asking myself prayerfully what it was that I really want to be about in ministry because deep in my heart I felt I wasn’t finding it there.

And over the course of that time, those desires crystallised around four key things. I realised that what I need to feel fulfilled, not just in ministry, but in life, are these four things:

Space, Settledness, Significance and Silence.

Once I’d come to that understanding, I realised that I wasn’t going to find enough of those to sustain me in community ministry, and that meant it was time to move on.

So here we are – five years plus in the parish. And though no parish is a panacea, we have more space, both literally and metaphorically; we’re now more settled in a community, and significant things have happened and are happening in the work that’s going on here.

But silence? Well, that’s the weakest link. Always has been and always will be, I reckon,

I’ve been thinking a lot about silence and her twin sister solitude over the past few weeks, largely because I’ve been reading the Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue and it’s something very close to his heart.

O’Donohue says there’s a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to yourself, he says, to go there more often – to be nourished, strengthened and renewed. But the only threshold to that place is the silence of solitude.

The mystic Thomas A Kempis picks up the same theme in words that many of us would recognise as the call of our own hearts: “O God the Truth, I am often wearied in reading and hearing many things. In you is all I wish for and desire. Let all who teach fall silent, let all things created fall speechless before you. Do you alone speak to me”.

There’s a basic law here of the spiritual life being expressed here. A law that we go against to the detriment of our souls. The only way to a deepening relationship with God is through the disciplines of solitude and silence.

Why? Because we need to find that still centre within ourselves from which we can respond to the myriad demands on our time and energy and emotions. If we spend no time there, we’ll be at the mercy of everything and everyone and before long those demands will grind us down.

O’Donohue argues that one of the reasons people are suffering from stress so much these days isn’t that they are doing stressful things, but that they allow so little time for silence.

The modern world conspires against silence and we have to be utterly countercultural to recover it. We have to switch off the TV, or the laptop, or the i-Pod, or the mobile. We have to put down the book or the newspaper for a while. We have to do what feels wholly unnatural at the beginning, and create ways to keep company with ourselves and with God for a while. Praying through the day, reflecting on a line or two of Scripture. Anything to get ourselves back in the place where we’re still enough to hear God speak to us.

I don’t intend to expound the Biblical passage we read this morning, - we’ll keep that for another day when I’ve swotted up on Revelation – but I chose it for one beautiful line. “When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour”.

Silence in heaven. Can you imagine the hush and the reverent expectancy of those moments? And what follows? Prayer flows out of the silence as a sweet offering to God, and in response to those prayers, God makes things happen on the earth.

Silence flows into prayer, which flows into activity. How often we try to make that river flow the other way.

We rush into activity without pausing to touch base with the one in whom all things hold together.

This morning, if you’re stressed, is it because you’re never still enough to listen either to yourself or to God?

If you’re feeling out of touch with yourself or God, is it because you’ve ignored the invitation to step over the threshold and experience silence and solitude for a wee while?

When were you last still and prayerful? How can that discipline become a part of your life’s pattern? How much longer can you go on without it?


Let me close with a parable that touches on these themes, and I’ll leave it with you to reflect on without further comment.


Once upon a time there was a man who lived on the edge of a bustling city whose people had forgotten how to be still. They threw themselves into work, they threw themselves into leisure and for two weeks every year they threw themselves onto sun loungers and fell asleep beside blue-tiled swimming pools.

Rarely, if ever, were they awake and not doing something diverting. If they didn’t have something to listen to, something to watch or something to do with their hands they quickly became unsettled. Diversion became a way of life; yet curiously, almost no-one paused to wonder what they were being diverted from.

The man in our story was strange, though. He craved silence; not just for its own mysterious beauty but because of what happened when he set time aside to be still and quiet. Otherness crept into the room, or disclosed itself having been there all along – he was never quite sure which.

Sometimes he had doubts. He’d chide himself for foolishness and fall back into his daily routines, but somehow he could never be content with his distractions. He worked hard, he tried to play along, but underneath all his attempts to fit in there was a restless spirit, searching this way and that for something he could not name and did not know. This otherness.

It happened that one day the urge was upon him and he set his feet upon a trail leading up through the forest to the hills behind the city. The track was barely discernable among the stinging nettles and wild flowers but every once in a while - standing drying dishes at his kitchen sink - he’d lifted his eyes and seen solitary figures veering off the highway and clambering through the undergrowth before disappearing into the maze of birch and pine. He’d stare after them, wondering what on earth they were doing in there.

“Soon I’ll know”, he thought, pushing the nettles aside with a mossy branch and grunting with the effort of the steep climb.

Within a few moments of broaching the tree-line he found himself immersed in the primal reverence of the forest; stirring leaves; the song of unseen birds; sunlight filtering through the treetop canopy; the earthy smell of new life mingling with decay. The more he walked the more he felt at one with himself and his surroundings.

Far off to his left, a narrow path climbed up a heathery bank strewn with boulders to the crest of the summit, but the distant sound of running water roused his curiosity and drew him further down into the depths of the forest.

Making his way across a carpet of brown pine needles. he emerged into a small clearing where a little stream gurgled its way through a gully. And there they were – sitting on fallen trees and boulders as if they’d been waiting for him to arrive. Four women and two men, none of whom he recognised but who welcomed him with smiling eyes like long lost friends.

“Sit down” said a young woman with auburn hair, patting the tree stump beside her. “This is where it happens”.

Such was the rightness of being there that he did as she asked without consciously forming the obvious question in his mind: “What happens?”.

“What do I do now?” he asked, looking into her eyes with a calm curiosity.

“Just wait and listen” she said. “And be. Soon you’ll understand”.

Lowering his head, he closed his eyes for a moment and slowed his breathing in readiness for whatever was about to happen. And then he felt it - a sudden, qualitative change in atmosphere like an unblocking of the senses. He felt more real; more present.

Opening his eyes, he saw a window hanging in mid air about twelve feet in front of him. It was white in colour, unglazed, and with one horizontal and one vertical slat. Translucent white curtains stirred gently at either side.

Through the frame, where the forest should have been, he saw a clear sky of eggshell blue which would have been unremarkable if he’d seen it anywhere else. Yet the more he gazed, the more he became aware that he was staring into the world of the otherness.

A stiff breeze from beyond cooled his face and made the curtains billow like washing on a clothesline. It felt like an invitation – something addressed to him – and he made the only response he could think of; inhaling deeply to fill his lungs with the essence of that place. His soul quickened with its goodness. Though he couldn’t describe the scent, from that moment onward any of his favourite smells – brewing coffee, a Sunday roast, his lover’s perfume, a wild rose – could evoke something of this moment, though never quite capture it

And then he heard the voices, carried on the same wind: hints of conversation in languages he couldn’t understand; laughter; singing; the murmurs of a vast crowd. The air was heavy with the weight of unseen presence. There were people beyond that window, but instinctively he knew there was something different about them. He felt like a child sitting on a darkened stairway, listening in as the adults talked and joked in the next room. Hearing them speak brought a yearning to be more than he was; to be better than he was.

As he listened, the voices began to tail off into a deep, expectant hush.
And then, from the otherness, came a word spoken from eternity: spoken for all that has ever been, but in this moment spoken only for him.

It sounded like the voice of an old friend he had not yet made, and it said:

“Come and see”.

In later years he couldn’t remember if the words that rose within him passed his lips or simply sounded in his heart, but everything within him said “I will”.

With that, the window faded from sight, and though sad that the moment had passed, he now knew the goal of his heart’s longing. The one who’d called him; the one who’d fashioned such a world. For the hints and shadows of that place seemed to him more real than the stones and trees around him or the silvery brook tumbling down off the hillside. Yet for all that, he loved them more for having tasted something of the glory that lay within and beyond them.

The others stood up and moved toward him, gathering him in a group embrace. “Do you see now?” said a smiling older man; grey haired and slight of frame. “There is more! You were right to think it!”.

“Nothing is ordinary” added the other man; tall, with a black beard. “The poet Hopkins was right - Everything is charged with grandeur. The otherness is all around us all the time if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear”.

“You have to learn how to live in this world mindful of what you’ve discovered” said the auburn-haired girl. “You have to stay in touch with the truth of the otherness.”

A heavy-set older woman nodded in agreement: “That’s why we come here. It’s hard to keep remembering. Things have a habit of fading when you get back to the city and its ways. Be mindful of that, son. We need this time. And we need each other to stay strong.”

And he did stay strong, for many years. Leisurely visits to the woods bred a deep faith in the reality of the otherness.

Each day, as he went about his life, he’d find himself seeing signs of the otherness in the most unexpected places and his heart would lift because he knew that there was this hidden life deep down in the depths of things. In the ordinary tasks of the day, in the lives of the people he met, in the beauty of the turning world.

Yet as time passed, the weariness of living among people who dismissed the very idea of otherness began to grind him down. No matter how he tried to put his experience into words, no matter how often he encouraged them to visit the woods for themselves, it seemed to make little or no difference. They were rarely still. They were always distracted. Even those who on occasion ventured up to the woods with him rarely saw the window and what lay beyond.

He grew despondent, and His visits to the woods grew less frequent. He started avoiding the other folk who visited the forest. The spells of stillness and silence that had marked his days were discarded for noise and busyness. He began to throw himself into everything he did to avoid the troubling thoughts that came to mind when he was on his own. Materially, he prospered. But he was no longer at home with himself.

His city-friends confided that they were glad he’d got past that strange phase he’d been in. Yet the truth was, his heart was growing cold. Beneath the surface, he felt hollow. Rather than expanding, his life seemed to be contracting to something vanishingly small.

Standing at the kitchen sink one evening, he saw a flash of auburn hair disappearing into the forest; and unbidden, an echo of that voice he’d heard from beyond the window all those years ago filled his mind: “Come and see” it said, in the same measured, accepting tones.

Setting down his tea-towel, he pulled on his walking shoes, picked up the mossy branch that sat at the back door, and started the long climb up the nettled hillside to where the trees, the window, and another way of living beckoned.

A way that realized that in the maelstrom of modern life, stillness and silence and disciplined attention are the threshold not only to the presence of God, but the presence of our own true selves.