Silence

The Only Promise Ever Kept

Silent is something I’ve been for a while here, to start with. I’ve thought of a thousand ideas and scrapped them. In a previous life I used to write little thought-pieces on Facebook. I knew my audience, I knew what would land, and I like to think I produced a handful worthwhile things out of the hundreds of things I wrote. The problem here is I haven’t quite figured out the tone I want to write in here, who I want to be, particularly with a degree of anonymity where I don’t have to be… me.

Silence is something I’ve been learning unintentionally. I’ve fallen in love with the woods. Once I get in, I don’t want to leave until I know that I risk hurting too bad to walk out or losing daylight. I’ve built up the capacity to walk a pretty good ways, a dozen miles or more regularly. If anyone goes with me, it’s my dog. She doesn’t talk much. And so I practice being silent for hours. I learned that I enjoy silence.

Someone from the prison group texted me the other day, someone who during my time leading actively came at me aggressively about my political beliefs. I was told I was missed and that sort of thing. I deleted it and moved along with my day. Were I a kinder person with more of a social battery and/or any intention of going back, I might have responded with some similarly untrue pleasantry. The perverse truth is he knows he’s part of the reason I left and he wants to make himself feel better. I didn’t want to give him that. My silence says more.

I grew frustrated with the church I was an elder at because I didn’t feel some of the things we were enthusiastically doing aligned with the words we were saying. I wrote a resignation letter from my position. Crickets — a bad kind of silence. When nothing changed after a significant period of time, I removed my presence when I felt that people wanted me to be there more than they wanted ME to be there. A form of silence. I believe it carries more weight than my words.

There’s a lot of noise in the world right now. So many competing voices thinking that if they can just make the right argument, or speak loudly and aggressively enough, their words will become truth. Do not underestimate the power of silence. Silence is not weakness. Silence isn’t even passive. Silence can be harsh, aggressive, malicious. But it can also be the peaceful option, the kind option, the sincere and honest option. I’m not sure which of these I chose in those situations - maybe a bit of both. The woods are never truly silent, and if they are, they’re telling you something loudly: You are in danger.

God has been silent lately, it seems. I have begged him to speak, to act, to do anything. I demand answers of him, and yet he remains silent. I grow angry that he doesn’t bend to my demands. I rage that he refuses to defend himself from those who do so much evil in his name. And yet… he does not speak. His silence is more powerful than mine.

“But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him.” — Shusaku Endo, Silence