Feel the Silence

We had given up on trying to decide on something for dinner. Instead my sisters and I sat down to the television in the breakfast nook and proceeded to watch the last half of a rerun of an old sit-com we were otherwise unfamiliar with. We chuckled at the creative dialogue formed between a husband and wife who recently discovered they were to be first-time parents. However, as the show came to a close, the story line wrapped up with the devastating announcement from the key character: she had miscarried. Without any to-do, the scene faded and the show ended.

Faith, my sister, looked to up. “Hmm.” She said softly, talking mostly to herself. “I’m glad they didn’t end with music – you know, the show jingle they always play at the end. It was a sad scene and that’s okay. You don’t need the extra noise all the time. Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand...”

“What?” I questioned as much as myself as of her. I could feel my breath quicken and my brow furrow and my eyes blaze with a sudden desperation. “Finish your sentence. Understand what?”

“That was it. Just understand...” Faith said all too matter-of-factly.

She may have said something more. I don’t really know; I wasn’t paying attention. All I could hear was one phrase, one sentence, on arbitrary comment made by a sister who often speaks much truth but rarely speaks with the eloquence I was sure I just heard. “Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand...”

I couldn’t sit still. I was restless, longing and desperate. I felt crazed. For reasons I couldn’t understand, somehow I felt it was the answer and the question. Because in one breath and the rapid beating of my heart I simultaneously declared “That’s it!” and “What’s it?” It was all so simple and yet so complicated.

Let the voices fade. My voice, the voice of the world – the voice of everything except for the voice of God. I wanted a God shaped q-tip to come and fill my ears so that there was room for Him alone. With all of the other voices faded – if even for mere seconds at a time – I heard silence. And the silence irritated me, agitated me, discontented me. Before too much time would pass I would always stand in utter impatience. “God!” I would scream – my voice, the voice needing to fade more than any other – invading the stillness, “Say something already! I’m here! I’m waiting! I’m listening!” But so often no answer would come.

I took the silence at value and saw it for what I thought it was – nothing. Sometimes if I was quiet before God long enough He would answer me. Though often the answer was as dissatisfying as “wait,” there was a response. But silence, silence was something else all together – neither the answer nor the question but the dead space in between – nothing. And yet, and yet perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it was both.

“Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand.” I have so often attempted to outlast the silence to hear the voice – the sure, gentle whisper, the knowing, the never audible but always genuinely the voice of God to receive the truth I longed and waited for. And in due time, God’s time...the answer, regardless of whether or not it was the one I had been hoping for, is mine to have. But never once have I stopped to consider the beauty of the silence. Never once can I remember trying to feel the silence. What does that even mean? What does that even look like?

My agitated discontent in seeking to understand with the lack of a voice, was it wrestling out the voice of silence? “Sometimes you just need to feel the silence to understand...” I considered for a moment that perhaps to hear and feel silence is not so much listening for the presence of something new – but listening for the exclusion of the other things. What does it feel like NOT to hear the other voices? Is THAT what it is like to feel the silence? When all of the other voices finally fade and all I hear is silence, am I finally hearing truth? What is there to understand in the stillness and solitude of the presence of God? And to what end does it lead to a point where I might understand...