No more silence

At a retreat I recently attended, we decided to spend a period of the afternoon in silence. While I was fine with the silence as I walked the beach and communed with the sunlight, I found it uncomfortable when I met another of our group and interacted with just a smile and a wave.

The nature of the discomfort was that it felt like I was shoving myself back into a box that I had been in for too long – it was a very familiar place that I had recently been finding my way out of, and I didn’t want to be stuck back in there again.

It’s not that I’ve been habitually silent. In fact, I’ve caused people discomfort too many times by dousing them with a torrent of thoughts with too little attention to the natural give and take of conversation. But these floods were perhaps induced by the paved over areas in my internal landscape, areas of enforced silence, the prohibitions to speaking in certain ways and situations.

Some of these silences were words that I wouldn’t say; some were things I wouldn’t talk about; some were situations in which I didn’t give myself permission to speak; some were people I didn’t give myself permission to speak to. These enforced silences didn’t keep me from thinking things – all kinds of things, which would get so thick that they would sometimes become another source of silence, as I knew or usually thought there was no way to fit them through the gates of communication.

What I want to say about this is that, although I didn’t even know before that it was a problem, I feel profoundly liberated to be out of that box. And I want to talk a bit about how I got out of it and why I think it’s a good thing.

The first step in liberation was starting to glimpse that I don’t need someone’s permission to be their friend. When I first glimpsed this, it was profound for me, and gave me a lot of courage to overcome shyness. But it has taken me many more years to fully realize this truth. I recounted my most recent revelations about this in the entry “Christ says yes II” in this blog. (Also in this blog, the entry “On being a Christian” touches on important parts of this realization.)

It’s been more recently that I’ve experienced a release from charged words and topics. It used to be that, in my internal landscape, there were certain words and topics where, if my mind would run over them, my voice would go silent. In some cases this was some sense of propriety, some sense of what kind of a person I am, which forbid me those words and topics. In some cases it was also that I had such a long habit of not speaking about these things that the words would come difficult. Then, if someone else began talking along those lines, while I might not actually have a problem with it, it would be impossible to convey that fact. My silence would shout judgment, whether I felt that way or not.

The release came about as I was working on finding my voice, and in conjunction with compassionate treatment of me by others. As it was coming about, I found some Biblical support for the direction I was going.

I was thinking about the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” And thinking about the name of the Lord, I thought of the passage in John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. These thoughts came together as – have only one God; have only one Word. Don’t have words be gods.

There were a few ways this was meaningful to me. First, because I realized it wasn’t right for any words to make me uncomfortable or make me judge someone else for using them. Second, I realized that also, in the area of persuasion and marketing, it’s not legitimate for words to make me or anyone want to do what is against our Godlike nature to do. It’s not legitimate for people to be brainwashed. The Word has the power to make itself heard. Finally, this corroborated what I wrote in this blog in “Love me; I love you, and the Hungarian Phrase Book” – that it doesn’t matter what words people are saying – only the Word can be communicated. Only love, and the deep value of each life form.

So I remain committed to staying outside of the box of silence. I remain committed to digging up the pavement in my internal landscape and exposing the soft earth to the penetration of rare seeds. I remain committed to keeping things light and moist so that new infrastructures of root and leaf may grow. Then my permeable surface will be able to take things in better, and give things out more appropriately, and the words I do speak will be of greater service.