It always feels strange to be talking about silence. It seems ironic to talk about it. We’re stuck before we start. And that is quite a good place to begin. To know from the word go that talking about silence is a slightly silly thing to do puts words into perspective.
I’ve been thinking about where and how we encounter silence in our ordinary lives, what the significance of some of those encounters is, and how they connect with some of the ways in which silence appears in scripture and in story. There are three experiences in which silence overtakes us. One of them is rather comical, one of them is not at all comical, and one of them is somewhere in between.
At some point, we’ve all had somebody say to us, “Just tell me what’s on your mind”—or worse still, “Just be yourself.” One quite common response to this is complete inarticulacy. “Just tell me what’s on your mind” is a suggestion that fails conspicuously to open things up. And similarly, when someone tells you to just be yourself, the problem is, “Well, what’s the self I ‘just have’ to be?” That’s one experience in which silence seems to overtake us.
