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In a congregation I once served was a man who’d been there many years—not a noisy person, but one who was pretty loud in his dislike of silence in the Sunday service. “That’s not what we pay you for,” he told me when we introduced a time of meditation every week—the briefest eye-blink of silent meditation, like a splinter of a plank of driftwood we can cling to in the turbulent wild waters of our crazy days and busy weeks, the slenderest sliver of quiet. “We’re not paying you to not talk,” he said, “I can be quiet by myself at home, or by turning down the volume,” which he frequently did, on his hearing aid, if he didn’t like the sermon or the choir or the announcements. Deliberate silence, shared silence, seemed to him a waste of time, and he sat each Sunday in the front row with three watches on his arm, all set to the time zones where his grown children were living. As the meditation began, he’d hold up his arm, tapping his wrist, timing the wasted seconds when nothing was spoken or heard or accomplished or solved or sung. After one minute he’d raise an eyebrow; after two minutes, he’d clear his throat or blow his nose or cough or accidentally drop his hymnal.

Silence is not the only way in. Meditation, reflection, contemplative prayer—they’re not the only doors to the interior life, not the only way in to the hidden chambers of the heart, or the deep recesses of the mind where memories are kept in scattered drifts like dust beneath a bed, and conclusions are drawn and creative ideas incubated in the dark subconscious. Silence is not the only way in to the deepest core of your being, which strangely is the part of you that connects most authentically to everyone else and everything else and even to the holy. (It’s so strange that we have to go inward in order to reach out to others with integrity and clarity and courage and love.) Silence is not the only way in to the soul, but it is one way. We practice it to rest and to remember that we are more than the sum of our opinions and fears, of our intentions and words and ideas. We breathe in and remember, even as fleetingly as the air fills the lung, that we’re embodied; we exist as bodies, made of air and water, fully mortal, only briefly here. We breathe in and acknowledge the body; we breathe out and remember the spirit, the spark, the light, the ember of divinity present at our birth and burning still, inside. Breathing in, breathing out, we come back to what we are. Or, at the very least, we let go of the reins for a single, blessed moment—let go of the will and the worry and the wanting, the endlessly wanting. For a second, we just breathe, and to do so together is a holy communion.

A woman wrote to me:

I would like to come into the church to sit for a moment in silence, or to meditate on a passage printed in the bulletin, or to listen to music, or even softly sing. Loving and large-hearted as they are, I would like to begin by not greeting my neighbors. By greeting something inside. For me it is a rare and needful thing.

For her it was, but for my friend with the three watches it was excruciating. He had been a scientist, a pragmatist, a lover of scheduled efficiency, complex problems with straightforward solutions. He was for a time the church treasurer, and for another time the chair of the social action committee: busy and task-oriented. He was also a lover of music—and when the organ filled that church with sound, or a string quartet or a single oboe pierced us, or a Gospel choir stomped and shook the house, he was in a kind of reverie. He had his own ways in to the life of the spirit, as each one of us does. He knew how to get there, how to go deep, how to shut his eyes and let the music, and sometimes the words of the readings, wash over his brow and smooth out the tension. He was a person not afraid to cry in church, to let tears fall, and I wondered sometimes about those grown children in their far-off time zones, and his wife who’d died, and how he lived alone. He knew how to get there, how to go deep, and how to come back to us restored.

There are a thousand ways to pray.

In the other hours, every day, we are driven to distraction by ten thousand large and little things, demanding things and enticing things, seductive, mind-numbing, dutiful things, night terrors and regrets, fears both justified and foolish, work things, play things, electronic things. It takes such discipline to be still, to be quiet, to listen to no sound. To be non-productive, ineffective, inefficient, slothful, prayerful, reverent, ready… for nothing.

When the house is clean, we say. When my desk is clear, bills paid, account balanced, my inbox empty, the decomposing Jack-o-lantern scraped from its puddle on the porch, the Christmas presents purchased, wrapped, hidden or mailed—then I’ll take a cleansing breath, because then I will deserve it. Once I stop eating, start exercising, stop working, start working, then I will listen to the winter night, light my candles, pray my prayers, take a conscious breath. I’ll get around to giving thanks, making amends, forgiving someone’s trespasses, maybe starting with my own. I’ll listen to my inside voice, and find the words to tell my children, tell my parents, tell my friend, how I love them. When everything’s in order, perfect order, when everything’s under control, my own control, I’ll be ready. I’ll be fully present to my life. The only trouble is, I may be very old by then, or dead.

I don’t know what in the life of my parishioner led him to be so deeply disturbed by silence, what history made silence terrifying. I do know that I learned about the beauty of silence when I was very young.

I have an old December memory, many decades old, that comes to me at this time of year, especially if there’s snow. It’s like an old Christmas card or treasured ornament: you hold it in your hand and it works like a time machine, transporting you back to a universe so far from where you are right now, and yet so familiar you can feel the scratchy wool and smell the mothball mittens. In this memory, my father and I are all bundled up, and together, after supper. It’s late at night (probably about 6:30), and we’re going for a walk outside, just the two of us, without my mother or my brothers. I am maybe five or six years old, and we are going to look at the holiday lights in our neighborhood. It’s magical. Everything is silent because of the snow on the ground and the snow shawling down, and silent also because of my hat and earmuffs and scarf. There are no cars, so we walk down the middle of the street, a wide white corridor with no other footprints, and colored lights all the way down, on both sides. Every house is like a silent diorama, with a Christmas tree or menorah in the window, and people moving in their living rooms or kitchens, playing the piano, watching TV, like life-size dolls in dollhouses. It is absolutely silent except for the scrunching of my jacket and snow-pants, which I only notice when we stop to eat snow or count the plastic reindeer on a rooftop. When we stop, we stand in a frozen ocean of quiet. We go hand in hand, very tall and very small, not talking, for miles and miles, hours and hours, all the way around our block. (It probably took about half an hour.)

All these years later, all this life later, when I feel myself being swept into the vortex of holiday expectations, the stress and noise and jangling, cheesy music everywhere, and white knuckle driving, and the requisite worry about money and family and losses and love, whether I look for it or not, this memory returns to me. Not just the snapshot image, but rather the visceral traces of wonder I felt as a child that night; the deepest dark, the coldest cold, the thickest snow, my father fully present (which at other times he really wasn’t), the snug houses, the enchanted lights, and silence.

This is a memory of a very simple thing—a walk round the block after dinner. I don’t really know if it happened just once or many times, but I do know that it set in me a longing in December that has nothing to do with holiday frenzy, nothing whatsoever to do with shopping or theology, and if I can remember to remember it, and dwell inside it, it centers me and anchors me, and reminds me that what I love at this time of year and what I need is a cold night, very dark, a little snow, and maybe someone to go walking with.

In the quiet, we remember what we are, which is not perfect, but wholly human (in both senses of the word, wholly/holy). The whole motion of Advent in the Christian calendar, as half the world goes dark, is toward remembering and waiting. Not for a single, exceptional, mythical child, but for the quiet conviction, the silent confession, that each life within all life is a gift. Each life, including your own. For that conviction to take root, to find words to give voice to that confession, you have to be willing to travel through darkness and silence. You have to be willing to wait.

Now is the time, there is no other time, for listening and breathing, to open your hands and let go of whatever it is that you’re clenching too tightly. To let go, and to let come, all that’s beyond your control.

We apprehend the holy in the spaces and the emptiness, the intervals, interstices, and pauses. It’s also where our own most true and honest voice resounds, long before we’re ready for prime time. We also know, and need constant reminding, that there is only one way to hear another person, only one way to behold and honor and acknowledge the worth and dignity and beauty of another person, the living holy scripture that is another human being. That is to bless their truth, their voice, their experience, to shut up and let them talk, to make space to amplify all the stories, all the words, that are not our own.

Silence is a spiritual practice and an ethical requirement, but only when balanced by speaking. We go within (in meditation, contemplation, prayer) in order to come out, to bring to full volume, full courage, full love the power and integrity and force of our conviction. Use your inside voice. Find your truth in listening to your heart, to your God, to the stories shared by other people, their testimony landing on your spirit like a holy offering. We share quiet to let that all sink in, and then encourage one another to use the full strength of our inside voices to bless the world, to heal and transform it. Silence is a practice, not a permanent condition. There’s a time for silence and for breaking silence; for waiting, and for sounding the alarm, for proclaiming why we can’t wait, why we won’t be silent anymore.

We go within in order to come out. Breathing in and breathing out, even for a fleeting moment in the middle of a Sunday, or any day, we listen for the breath of God, the breath of life and conscience. We restore the soul, and then repair the world.

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Rev. Victoria Safford

Lead Minister at White Bear UU Church, Mahtomedi, MN

The Reverend Victoria Safford was called to White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in 1999, following a ten-year ministry at Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was ordained, and four years as a community organizer with the American Friends Service Committee.A native of New York State, she is a graduate of Vassar College and Yale Divinity School.She is the author of Walking Toward Morning and With and Without Candlelight, both from Skinner House Books, and her essays have been anthologized in many collections. She lives in Mahtomedi, Minnesota with her partner, Ross.

Latest posts by Rev. Victoria Safford (see all)

• Use Your Inside Voice - December 1, 2020
• The Soul of the Whole - June 1, 2017
• Bound in Covenant (Excerpt) - March 1, 2017