We have built a worldwide metropolis of glitz and clamor and so we are complicit in her faults. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have built a monster and our monster has stolen both silence and quiet from us.

Silence, until the early 1900’s, was a fundamental condition for our daily contentment. James Houston defines this attentive silence as “the removal from agitation, bustle, and speed to see things in stillness. It is where we silence our passions and recede from our tensions” (“A Guide to Devotional Reading”, The Mind on Fire). Our world is anything but silent and our entire frame of reference springs not from cogitation and contemplation but from various sources of unbridled stimulus: music, movies, email, text messaging, television, computers, and billboards.

Moreover, our shared experience finds its source in television. Rarely do books enrich our shared experience and so we no longer share the same qualitative silence. Our primary shared experience is “the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy” as Neil Postman calls it. We pay less attention to reality and more attention to the secondary and virtual. To put it bluntly…

Our reality is no longer the here and now.

Instead, reality is shaped by the pseudo-connectivity of a flat world where nearly every interaction, both interpersonal and cognitive, is brief and, therefore, often shallow. Christians are not immune to this mess. Again, James Houston writes, “Christians are more concerned about the promotion of our faith than its private practice. Busyness is more significant than godliness. We are afraid to listen to God because we are more concerned about what other people think. The herd mentality and the tyranny of consensus-what Aldous Huxley once called ‘herd intoxication’-makes us afraid of solitude, of facing God alone…”.

Depth and fullness of relationship and thought are recoverable when we learn to carry an attitude of silence with us, but this silence is only attainable after we overcome a roadblock born from living in a chatty society. Silence gives us a feeling of gaping emptiness, not richness and fullness, and we feel the tremendous urgeto fill the void with something busy and rhythmic. Our world, as it currently exists, is antithetical to silence, but silence is the proper origin of words and the only proper context by which to evaluate and contemplate words. Since we have no silence, our words lack meaning and purpose. Even words, whose beginnings were found in the logos, are so proliferated and diffused that they have grown nearly meaningless.

Henri Nouwen continues, “A word that bears fruit is a word that emerges from the silence and returns to it. It is a word that reminds us of the silence from which it comes and leads us back to that silence. A word that is not rooted in silence is a weak, powerless word that sounds like a clashing cymbal and a booming gong. All this is true only when the silence from which the word comes forth is not emptiness and absence, but fullness and presence, not the human silence of embarrassment, shame, or guilt, but the divine silence in which love rests secure.”

Christians are called to respect words in a world that whores them.

To that end, we would do well to foster an interior silence and carry it with us. Only when we carry silence with us-not to rudely ignore others, but as the source of our conversation-only then will we more successfully discard our inward tendency toward anxiety and distraction as we rest in Christ. Jesus Christ, the great blueprint of holiness, was impactful in part because he preserved his solitude. He retreated from the crowds so that He might return to them more recollected, more devoted, more filled by silence and, therefore, more effective for ministry. He spoke out of silence and so people listened.

Jesus touched the throngs with what Sertillanges calls a “soul of silence”.

This purity of silence can be practiced even amongst the busyness of modern Americana, but the same things that destroy silence are those that easily erode the home of silence: the soul.
Richard Foster, in his book Celebration of Discipline reinforces this prioritization of silence in the Christian’s life: “If we are constantly being swept off our feet with frantic activity, we will be unable to be attentive at the moment of inward silence. A mind that is harassed and fragmented by external affairs is hardly prepared for meditation. The church Fathers often spoke of Otium Sanctum: ‘holy leisure.’ It refers to a sense of balance in the life, an ability to be at peace through the activities of the day, an ability to rest and take time to enjoy beauty, an ability to pace ourselves.”

This Otium Sanctum is a necessary characteristic of a mature Christian (a title worth pursuing, even though we will forever be chasing it…even in eternity) because if he is to live attentively, he must carry with him a spirit of silence that keeps at arms length the barking world.