A Liturgy of Silence
What can the quiet do with us?
When my words become muddled, I’ll be content with my silence. When I have nothing good to say, I’ll greet the quiet as it comes. But are we not supposed to pray on every occasion? Now, here comes something that has more worth than my full hours often allow for, or grant: to be silent in prayer, might I make silence a liturgy?
And yet my heart breaks for sometimes in my silence I am overwhelmed with my own trouble, my own fears, anxieties, failures, inadequacies, and exasperations. But perhaps this, my repulsion to silence, is a wound that needs rinsed out before it can begin to be healed. It is the chaos which, in offering it, waits for the very voice of God to hover over the waters of the deep, and make something of it. I offer and I wait. Yet, I am still silence’s novice. From my waking moments to my nightly routine there is little time for it. There is always a crowd of busyness and advertisement around me. To do and be, and do and be, more. It is a hurried world with hurried people—and the hurry, we are told, is the point of it all—with moral implications, moral imperatives. But what of the voice in stillness, the liturgy of silence? Is there no place for that?
In my silence I hear only my own breathing. It is startlingly loud. But it is what I have, and so breathing will be my prayer. An unlikely thing to consider—or, maybe it isn’t. Perhaps this is only a custom that is strange to my modern, Protestant sensibilities. Yet maybe it is nothing more than using the old, original gift of breath to give something that is most dear to us back to God: our time. We have breath, therefore, life—therefore, time, and we give it back. Like children with open palms we offer this. It becomes the foundation of our liturgy of silence, we give back time, and believe that what will be done with it will not let us down.
Now, to consider this is to consider one of the original mysteries: that we are alive. Not machines, no, we are living, we are breathing. And so, we are breath-creatures, it is the metronome of our days. And as we are breath-creatures we are also dust-creatures. We have bodies. And with our bodies we can do all sorts of things, one of those things is express ourselves. Emphatic hands in conversation shows this well. As we sit in silence and breathe what do we wish to express? A breath in and out, we are noticing it now. Perhaps dependence—with the rising and falling of our chests, we wish to breathe, and, for the first time in a long time give thanks for it, give thanks for the reality of living. Now, something else, if our breath is hurried we might wish to express our desire for peacefulness, and so we breathe deeply and recollect God’s goodness: that of His nature, but also His goodness to us in our past. And, if we are heavy-burdened, perhaps we wish to express something more; perhaps in our anguish we wish to sigh, to groan, and to give God our deepest worries, about our now, and our future. Worries that no words can find.1
So in our silent liturgy we have given thanks, remembered our God and worshipped him, and also offered him our supplications, just with breathing, just with silence, souls inclined. It is sort of like being at a dinner table with a loved one, someone you are very close to—after you have not seen them for some time. There, after good conversation dies down comes a moment, comes a stage, if you are very glad to be with them, where you just sit in silence and enjoy the silence with them. And you realize the silence is not empty, but full, so full you do not need to search quickly for words. You are content simply being with them.
But it occurs to me that we may have trouble with being this kind of comfortable, comfortable with silence. This is a practice-learned, after all. To begin our liturgy of silence we may first have to settle our minds, minds that are going in different directions according to a full day and full life. Before we can enter silence, we might need to dim down the other places our minds are wanting to go to. And so we might look to a bit of Christian history and try what the Desert Fathers did to achieve that kind of quieting. We might try to breathe scripture and allow it to settle us for the silence. We breathe a prayer with words so that eventually we may breathe easier after them. Here is one.
“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)
And so let’s make it personal, near to us.
Breath inward—“Be still”
Breath outward—“and know that You are God”
To know God—that is the truth we desire for our own hearts.
And with this prayer we try to not rush, but engage it, say it, and mean it a little more than last time.
“Be still,
and know that You are God.”
And make it the sole thing we want to think on, for this moment.
“Be still,
and know that You are God.”
And we keep going until we can cease to say it, but continue to hold it in our soul.
An activity not peculiar, because it calls to mind another psalm, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”2
The whole thing with silence is that after we get used to it, it begins to feel a bit like getting air after diving down deep to grab shells off the ocean floor. Sometimes as we go about our days, we lose track of how breathless we are until we find the quiet, find the stillness, find repose in our liturgy of silence.
The silence may have us speak less, but in doing so, we may hear more. Silence not empty, nor wasted, but lived, full.
“It has sometimes been said that the real problem in prayer is not the absence of God but the absence of us. It's not that God isn't there; it's (nine times out of ten) that we are not. We are all over the place, entertaining memories, fantasies, anxieties. God is simply there in unending patience, saying to us, 'So when are you actually going to arrive? When are you going to sit and listen, to stop roaming about, and be present?'”
—Rowan Williams
“There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech. We should be better Christians if we were more alone, waiting upon God, and gathering through meditation on His Word spiritual strength for labour in his service. We ought to muse upon the things of God, because we thus get the real nutriment out of them. . . . Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God’s Word. They love the wheat, but they do not grind it; they would have the corn, but they will not go forth into the fields to gather it; the fruit hangs upon the tree, but they will not pluck it; the water flows at their feet, but they will not stoop to drink it. From such folly deliver us, O Lord”
― Charles H. Spurgeon
Romans 8.26
Psalm 19.14