Could this be how God mentors us? Is God's apparent silence the method of a Master Teacher? When I go through seasons where God's answers do not come quickly or on the surface of things - but the way God interacts with my prayers draws me into deeper trust, dependence and obedience - the answers I find radically transcend what I initially sought to find.
• I get introduced to sin that I needed to confront.
• I recognize patterns of behavior I need to break.
• I gain insights into who I am that I didn't have before.
• I discover a depth of relationship with God that I have never before experienced.
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Such revelations are worth the silence.
Kathleen Norris allows her students to make all the noise they want, but then she calls on them to "make silence." Reflecting on the experience, her elementary-age pupils note that when they were silent, they felt as though they were "waiting for something." One wrote, "Silence is me sleeping waiting to wake up." Perhaps the most profound observation comes from a little girl who said, "Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go."6
Few statements could be more profound. We think of a word from God as the soul's main sustenance, but silence is a true compatriot not simply for where it leads but for what it affords: space for God to speak beyond the answers we seek.
"It is no surprise," writes Frederick Buechner, "that the Bible uses hearing, not seeing, as the predominant image for the way human beings know God."7 Perhaps this deeper communion is behind the concept of vigils ("waiting"), the ancient name for extended prayers given while one might normally be sleeping. It also suggests why the first word of St. Benedict's Rule for monasteries is listen.
Before even these insights came the ancient desert tradition of Christianity. Alan Jones writes of men and women entering the literal desert even as they embraced a "desert" of the spirit — at once "a place of silence, waiting, and temptation" and "a place of revelation, conversion, and transformation." According to the desert tradition, "empty" places such as the desert were actually full, for in the deadening silence of such experiences, people were known to be reborn.8 This was certainly the experience of Jesus, who was led by the Holy Spirit into the desert to begin his ministry, and then led into the desert again to end it. Jesus' cry from the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" speaks to the separation within the Trinity as Jesus took on the world's sin, but it also serves as a "silent" reminder to Jesus of a "deeper magic" that causes death itself to work backward. As Larry Crabb notes, Jesus screamed in agony "God, where are you?" and God seemed to say nothing. But deep was calling to deep, and in his reconciling the world to himself Jesus heard the voice of God in the depths of his heart.9