How Silently, How Silently

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, I feel that I can listen to Christmas Carols in good conscience. Though to be honest, I actually started somewhere around Halloween. Yesterday I was reflecting on the line from O Little Town of Bethlehem which goes: “How Silently, How Silently the wondrous gift is given….” In this lyric Philips Brooks is comparing the stillness of Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth to the silent miracle of salvation.

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given;

so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.

No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,

where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”

But Brooks’s lyric is also a reminder to me of how often silence is a feature of our experience with God. We know that God can speak. The Bible tells us that He spoke creation into existence. We read the Bible and regard it as His word. Yet for many–I would say most– of us it feels that God responds to us in silence. This is one of the things that tends to make prayer so hard. We feel as if we are engaged in a one sided conversation. We don’t know what to make of God’s silence and so misinterpret it, just as we might the silence of a friend or lover. We think that God’s silence is proof of His absence or we take it as a sign of disinterest. It is easy to see why.  We have been taught to think that people who care speak up. Those who don’t speak don’t care.

That’s also why so much of the communication we hear these days seems to come in the form of a shriek. Whether it is an audible shout or an emoji filled, all caps, bold face post on social media, outrage has become our culture’s primary Love Language. So we naturally think that if God does not respond in some emphatic way to our pleas it must mean that He doesn’t care about us.

We equate God’s silence with disengagement. In Psalm 28:1 David says, “To you I call, O LORD my Rock; do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.” Notice the connection between silence and deafness. This is our fear when it comes to God’s silence. We worry that it means that God can’t hear us or even worse that He won’t hear us. One of the ironies of this is that in the Bible we find that God’s speech can be more difficult to bear than His silence. According to Exodus 20:19 when the Israel heard God declare the Law from Mount Sinai, they begged Moses to act as His go-between: “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Ex. 20:19). God’s silence is sometimes a sign of judgment. But it may also be a mercy.

Silence doesn’t necessarily mean disinterest. It is also a mark of attention. Those who listen are silent. Silence is also emphatic. Silence often acts as God’s exclamation point, forcing us to focus on the situation at hand. Instead of speaking to us in words, God communicates through our circumstances. Silence is a feature of stillness and stillness is a characteristic of those who wait. “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him” Psalm 37:7 urges, “do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.” Those who are still are waiting for God to act.

Such a strategy seems counter-intuitive in this age of activism. I mean we can’t do nothing can we? Surely we should do something! Of course the answer is that when we are still, we are doing something. We are waiting. We are expecting. We are trusting. Stillness is the atmosphere of Bethlehem, as God draws near in silence and relative obscurity. When the time had fully come, God sent His Son (Gal. 4:4). When our time is fully come God will act on our behalf. In the meantime, the best thing we can do may be to be still and wait.