The dread our day is a surprising thing. In this post-modern culture there is one thing we avoid more than any other, dread more than we are willing to admit, there is something we will not allow...
...it's silence.
Everywhere you go there is noise. We have it on at home, even if we don't really listen to it. We have it on in the car, it's at the restaurant, we even carry it with us when we jog or walk.
Noise is our pacifier that keeps us from dealing with what must happen in a moment of silence.
With the noise of our life we never have to think about life, mortality, God, or our choices. We can drown them out with the noise that forces those horrible thoughts into the recesses of our minds.
Noise keeps eternity at bay. As long as we have noise we don't have to think...to really think about our lives, our choices, about God.
Silence has become the enemy of our culture.
Look around and see if you can find a place in your life where there is silence and I guarantee you will look for some noise to fill it. How have we allowed the important questions that silence would generate be drowned out by Rush Limbaugh, music on our iPods and the noise of TV? We have been numbed by it and slowly plod to our fate, well entertained, without a thought about our mortality.
It's amazing that such a simple thing as noise has made us a culture of zombies, not thinking or really listening to the voices that come in a time of silence.
I would invite you to find at least an hour in your day where there is silence. I'm sure it will be uncomfortable, but schedule it into your life and listen for what you will find in the silence. You might actually hear from God.
2 comments:
Terrific! This is SO true. Even reading, I find I have music playing in the background - yes, easy listening - instrumental Christian or "elevator" music, but still noise,
Interesting that I was doing study on solitude and silence this morning and happened upon this quote from Dallas Willard's book, Spirit of the Disciplines. He writes: " ... Silence is frightening, because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life. It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world, and leave only us and God. And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to "just us and God"? Think what it says about the inner emptiness of our lives if we must always turn on the radio, (TV, etc) to make sure something is happening around us."
Thanks for articulating this dread so well.
Stephen Sjostrom said...
I love the subject, "Silence" and the last three words, "hear from God"! If "not hearing God" were the malady, the most common prescription for healing would be silence.
Silence allows one to more consistently and reliably *choose* an object or idea (God) on which to meditate instead of just default meditation based on surrounding, circumstance, or whatever drifts into the mind.
Silence > Meditation > God/Word = hear God
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