The Blessings of Silence (Meditation)

*This entry and the next are old newsletter articles I used on a Sunday, January 8, 2017, a day when I knew snow and bitter cold would reduce attendance. I did this because my planned sermon for this day was tailored for the ordination/installation of new officers, which we postponed for one week. A.H.

         Where I grew up, we had two seasons – summer and January 26^th. So, real winter weather always quickens my heart.

Friday night I went to bed with a light flurry falling. Saturday I awoke to a world transformed, a place where valleys had been lifted up and rough places made plain by thick, blinding-white powder. Yesterday afternoon, Marianne and I went to Persimmon Ridge to walk the slick, snow-covered trails. We bundled up against the frigid air. We stepped high to keep snow from spilling into our boots. Climbing one hill, I looked up. The sky arched above us like a magnificent crystal bowl, so stunningly blue, so clear and cold it seemed that a loud noise would shatter it and send the pieces clattering to earth like coins spilling across a stone floor.

“Let’s stop here for a minute,” I said. “I want to get a picture of this.”

         Early yesterday, before the sky had cleared off to that brilliant blue, I took note of another gift of a snowy day: the silence. Usually when we walk outdoors in Jonesborough, the din of traffic out on 11E reminds us that we live in a world beset by ceaseless busyness. We rush and push, desperate not to miss something, afraid to come in a lowly second or third. But when snow falls thick as grace, and stops us alive in our tracks, our busyness often slows enough to allow us to sit still and to witness anew the beauty of God’s good creation. And to play in it. In the snow, adults often become like children.

Perhaps one of the more devastating effects of our separation from God is the way we tend to fill the voids in our lives with noisy stuff and perpetual motion. But sitting still and quiet in the presence of God can be quite difficult. I often try to force my way into silence, and when I do, I burden it. My mind races with things I ought to be thinking and doing. But silence is like God’s presence. It’s something we enter like a sanctuary. We ease into its arms. It enlivens us with new awareness of and appreciation for the gentle ways that God speaks and moves in the world.

         When winter snows us in and slows us down, grace helps us to hear God inviting us to let go of the clutter, all the urgent distractions that leave our lives rutted with deep valleys and ragged with roughness. And who knows? Maybe we will even find the stillness so life-giving and renewing that we will discover ways to lay aside our frenetic comings and goings each day, at least long enough to feel the presence of God falling around us like snow. 

         Life in the Spirit is not all wintry playfulness and awe, of course, but it is a foretaste of eternity.

         Having learned the blessings of silence and stillness, David wrote these words:

Psalm 23

¹The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not want.

²He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters;

³he restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.

⁴Even though I walk through the darkest valley,

I fear no evil;

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff –

they comfort me.

⁵You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

⁶Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord

my whole life long.