A Gentle Breeze
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by Tony Sayer
The theology of spiritual direction is a theology of silence. This insight was a gift to me from one of my directees, whom I will call Sally.
Before my second session with her, she requested that we spend most of the hour in silence. I agreed in a noncommittal kind of way. The truth is, I did not want to spend most of the hour in silence. I was avidly reading Thomas Hart's "The Art of Christian Listening" and had already discovered that I was a novice listener. I wanted to hear Sally talk so I could practice my listening skills.
As it turned out, we did not spend that hour in silence, but this seemingly minor and preliminary encounter with Sally has loomed large in my reflecting about our relationship, my relationship with God and my relationship with silence.
I wasn't thinking or reflecting about God when I had my encounter with Sally. I wasn't aware of God's presence. God didn't enter into it. Reflecting back, I see that I wasn't really even thinking about Sally when I had my encounter with Sally. I wasn't alert. I wasn't aware. I wasn't really paying attention. Basically, I wasn't open to an encounter with God because I was unprepared to regard my momentary contact with Sally as a real encounter with her.
But in fact it was a real encounter--with Sally and with God, who I now see was speaking to me and my condition through Sally's expressed desire for silence. God was right there in this seemingly unimportant exchange.
Why was I so intent on practicing my listening skills instead of actually listening? If I wanted Sally to talk, why was I so unprepared to listen when she talked to me about our next session? Why did I imagine that I could only listen to Sally, or to God, when she was speaking? Did I not grasp that I could listen to the silence and that such listening might be particularly fruitful?
I could pull from my readings many passages that speak to the value of silence as a practice that opens us to the presence of God, and I could pile up the helpful books that recommend silence as a Christian practice. But it is in fact this focus on silence as a practice that carries with it a possibility of misleading us or at least me.
The emphasis in most cases is on our silence: our entering into stillness, our creating an open space where we can encounter God. Silence is what we offer to God so that we might better hear what God has to say. We don't always acknowledge that silence, especially God's silence, can retain a quality of speech--can in itself be a kind of speech and perhaps the purest, most fruitful speech.
In Eleanor Abarno's article, "Everyday Theology," I found this: "Since what is articulated about God is grounded in a larger, ineffable, whole-self knowledge of God, we want to be respectful of what is not spoken.... We know more than we can put into words, more than we want to put into words. To honor a person's theology is to honor what he or she does not say."
Abarno seems to be saying that there is a grace, a courtesy, in the direction relationship that pays special attention and gives special honor to silence, and her words take on new depth in light of my encounter with Sally.
Sally offered me her silence, and I was unprepared to accept or even understand her gift. I was unprepared to acknowledge that Sally's silence might be a powerful way for her to reveal herself to me--perhaps as powerful, perhaps even more powerful, than her spoken words.
Sally's silence, and mine, and yours, and our ability to communicate powerfully and profoundly through what is not spoken, are grounded in God's silence, which is not only to be understood as the absence of God's speech, or even to be understood as the background of God's speech, but is in fact a form of God's speech, perhaps indeed the deepest and most profound form--though putting it this way should not mislead us into thinking that God's silence is, after all, not really silence. If, as Abarno says, "to honor a person's theology is to honor what he or she does not say," then to honor God is, in part, to honor what God does not say.
Let Elijah's encounter with God on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19) stand for this understanding of the God who communicates through silence, whose purest speech perhaps is silence: God's whisper, God's murmur, "a still small voice," "the sound of a thin silence," "a sound of sheer silence." R.A. Herrera calls this the "theophany of a gentle breeze." The gentlest breezes are almost undetectable, can barely be felt--and make no sound at all.
Tony is a participant in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Winter 2006. This article is an excerpt of one of his program papers.