Gospel reading: Luke 12.13-21 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)
I spent a week up on Petit Jean mountain this summer at Camp Mitchell as chaplain. Silence is hard to come by among 95 elementary school kids. But it can happen.
The Camp Mitchell gimmick is the silent coyote. You can make one yourself out there in blogland. Touch your ring and middle fingers to your thumb and extend your index and pinky fingers. There you have it: the silent coyote.
Now as you might suspect, some training - or Pavlovian conditioning, perhaps - is necessary for the silent coyote to silence a roomful of campers. The routine is much like the one Kathleen Norris describes in the elementary classrooms she visited. The kids are told to make as much noise as they can and then to stop the noise immediately at a signal - a dropped hand or a silent coyote as the case may be. It takes a little practice, but eventually they get it. The kids learn how to, in Katheen Norris's words, 'make silence'.
Considering silence as something made, as a presence of something rather than an absence, reminds me of Claude Debussy's famous insistence that music is "the space between the notes". Space and notes are both necessary to music (John Cage notwithstanding), just as silence and noise are both necessary to our lives. Bad music happens when we stop paying attention to one or the other.
You see this chapter wasn't only about silence. It was also about the words that can come about when we have been silent. When the children were asked to write about their experience they said things like, "strength is as slow and silent as a tree" and "Silence is spiders spinning their webs" and even, "Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go." Silence makes for better words.
On Sunday we read one of Jesus' more famous lines: "Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." I suppose greed is a kind of noise without silence. Maybe greed is not allowing enough space around our desires to enjoy the things we really want.
Sometimes we have to stop talking in order to hear, to stop wanting in order to enjoy, to stop the noise in order to speak. Maybe we need a silent coyote (I know you made one when you read the second paragraph) too. A signal to ourselves that the space in our lives must be made. And without it the notes are just noise.
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(ramblings on theological things)
About Me
- Scott Walters
- Rector, Christ Episcopal Church, Little Rock, AR
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3 comments:
On Luke 12:20
"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'"
In silence, the names and pictures of Americans killed in foreign wars, are run at the end of the "News Hour" on AETN each night. Sometimes I can make myself sit and watch, sometimes I can't. The silence is almost unbearable. So used to chatter and noise, the silence seems to yawm before me like a grave, reminding me that these neighbors are dead, and I'm still not sure why. The silence screams at me about the families of these soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, who endure the limits of their ability to sustanin grief, while I am comfortably watching the news. Like a thunder rumble, the silence calls me to action, even if the action is just to witness the fresh young faces of Americans with so much promise, now dead. Like the clickity-click of a cash register, the silence tick off the unimaginable cost of their absence.
We who are so wealthy and comfortable in various ways, fill our lives with the conversations, activities and prayers of our everyday, while the pregnant vacancies of these lives call to us in silence. Occasionally in our Sunday prayers, the liturgy gives us a space for silence. I so want to rush to the next line of the prayer, to get out of that uncomfortable spot where the words of Luke 12:20 speak.
Many days I cannot make myself sit in silence and look into the eyes of these dead ones. And so, Kathleen Norris gives me the prayer poem of a child, "Silence is spiders spinning their webs, it's like a silkworm making its silk. Lord, help me know when to be silent."
Beautifully put, Trey. As one of the kids in Amazing Grace said of silence, "It's scary."
And the scariest silence we encounter in the face of horrors like those you describe is God's. Maybe this is why there is so much yelling in the psalms.
"Silence Equals Death!" was a slogan that AIDS activists used in the early 80s when loved ones were dying and Presidant Reagan could not bring himself to even say the word "AIDS." I was reminded of that today, when I had a conversation with a very nice woman at AETN, about the pledge drive and the roll call of Americans killed in action, which seems to have been suspended while public television raises some necessary money. I told her that I had mentioned the roll call in a bolg entry. She asked what it was about and I told her a little about Christ Church's blog and this week's subject, at which point she said, "Silence can also be deadly." Good point.
There are difficult issues facing our denomination and the wider Anglican Communion. An Episcopal priest told me today, that people are execcted for being gay, in countries where the Anglican Communion is strong.
Integrity Arkansas will meet on the 18th of this month, at the home of Ted Holder, to discuss the way forward on gay rights and the Episcopal Church. I have come to the conclusion that this is not my fight, and I can contribute best by being silent, but I am powerfully aware that there is a time to be silent and a time when "Silence Equals Death." This brings me back to the prayer of a child, "Lord, help me know when to be silent."
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