Wed. 8 Dec. 2021

Silence

The Rev. Robert E. Stevens, Jr.

During Advent we are bombarded with the Noise…I pray that each of us can cultivate a practice of carving out a little silence so we might hear the still small voice of God. In my sermon Sunday I mentioned an exercise that Kathleen Norris used with her students. This story reminds me again and again the power of silence and the wisdom that can emerge when we take a little time and rest in quiet.

“Over the years when I worked as an artist in elementary schools, I devised an exercise for the children regarding noise and silence. "I’ll make a deal with you", I said, "first you get to make noise, and then you’ll make silence…"

What interests me most about my experiment is the way in which making silence liberated the imagination of many children. Very few wrote with an originality about making noise. Most of their images were clichés, such as “we sound like a herd of elephants.” But silence was another matter; here, their images often had a depth and maturity that was unlike anything else they wrote. One boy came up with an image of strength as being “as slow and silent as a tree,” another wrote that “silence is me sleeping waiting to wake up.” “Silence is a tree spreading its branches in the sun.” In a parochial school one third grader’s poem turned into a prayer: “Silence is spiders spinning their webs, it’s like a silkworm making its silk. Lord help me to know when to be silent.” And in a tiny town of western North Dakota a little girl offered a gem of spiritual wisdom that I find myself returning to when my life becomes too noisy and distractions overwhelm me: “Silence reminds me to take my soul wherever I go.”

Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith