Learning to Be Quiet
On the strange, silent word, made of flesh. | The Word in the Wild, The First Sunday After Christmas, Year B
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us…”
She was in bed, eyes alert but unmoving, sometimes turning toward me, sometimes away—her gray hair brushed but unkempt by her movement against the pillows. I sat in a chair, metal legs and plastic arms, with a thin cushion that was an afterthought toward comfort. At first I’d ramble on. I wondered aloud at the photographs of people by her bed. Who were they? I told her about my family, the young daughters I had at home. As I spoke, she’d occasionally make a noise, a slight movement, and I thought she might be communicating, but usually she just shifted her position and I realized it was not any kind of response. Eventually, I’d give up on words and sit uncomfortably for a few moments before moving on to the more communicative residents.
I was, at the time, doing a rotation of Clinical Pastoral Education. It is a sort of hands on training for would be clergy and chaplains in the art of pastoral care. I was taking part in a program at Goodwin House, a progressive care retirement center in Alexandria, Virginia. From independent living to full nursing and memory care, it was a place full of elderly people from whom I had much to learn. From retired Bishops to former journalists, I enjoyed my conversations with many of the residents, but I think I learned most from that woman in the bed, the one who couldn’t speak.
I found such a lack of speech difficult. Words have always been my way of getting by in the world, the way I’ve both understood and communicated. What could I offer, if my words had no effect? I brought this up in a session with the other members of my Pastoral Education program. The director, a large mustached man from Minnesota who carried with him a deep kindness advised that I not say anything, that what mattered was just being present to this woman. Words, he said, often get in the way and lead us to try to fix people; healing, rather than fixing, often comes by silent presence.
And so I started to sit and say nothing. I would set a time—ten minutes, twenty minutes—and focus on just being present to her. It was a practice that began to spill out into other parts of my life. When my daughters would hurt themselves and cry, I stopped frantically trying to fix them. Instead, I learned to just hold them quietly, until the tears went away. And I began to learn too, that though my days in seminary were filled with reading and lectures, liturgies and discussions, that what really mattered behind it all was the quiet presence of God that could never be captured by any formulation, any word spoken or scribbled on paper.
There is much that has been written about God. My shelves are full of books on theology and spirituality, prayer and ethics. And we have the bible, a book we rightly call the “Word of God,” that has over 700,000 individual words in the English translations. But from the beginning to the end, the language of God isn’t about words, but the silent presence behind them. And it is this truth that comes to us most profoundly and fully in Christ, the word made flesh that came to be with us.
The Gospel of John, in its profound and beautiful opening, calls Jesus God’s word. But it is a strange word, a word made of flesh. Words of flesh sound different from the words of text and speech. Words of flesh communicate through presence, a presence that does not break the silence.
Jesus, this Word, never wrote anything. The books that record his life and teachings are sparse. They are like poetry,
“little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers…” As Wendell Berry once put the poet’s task.
They are words that do “not disturb
the silence from which [they] came.”
And yet, because they are lines tracing the body, the life, of the Word made flesh, they express God’s abiding nearness. God came to be with us and is with us still. But this presence isn’t the loud ramblings of our media. It isn’t the new and unfamiliar love that talks late into the night. And it isn’t the new chaplain who thinks that more talk will somehow bring wholeness to a woman robbed of words.
God’s word of flesh is the presence of a long friendship, a long love, the kind that no longer needs to say anything, but is satisfied simply in being with. And all who want to follow the way of this Word would do well to also find the way toward its silent, abiding light.
One day, after weeks of daily visits to the woman without words, I went to her room and found the bed empty. I found an aid that worked on the floor. She told me the woman was doing better and was up in the common room. I went toward the room and heard the notes of a piano, the hammers bouncing across the strings in a harmony I couldn’t imagine playing. As I turned the hall I saw her, this wordless woman, sitting at the keys, playing a song. It wasn’t silence, but in those notes there was something that could never be said. They carried a presence, the withness of God, holding us in the quiet that comes when there is nothing else to say.
My silence did not heal her, but it did heal me. In quieting myself I learned to listen. And in that listening, I began to catch a deeper music, a harmony of silence. I still find my way toward words, too many words, and I often enter the room of someone in pain and sorrow, wanting to offer some chatty comfort. But at the best times, I catch that quiet song in myself, and say as little as I can. I wait, I listen, and I offer my presence in some hope that my flesh, my being with, will communicate that strange Word that made all and is in all.
I work as an RN at a large VA hospital and although my unit is not memory-care or geripsych, many of my patients are heading towards the loss-of-communication doorway. I struggled with the same issue when I first started here and have now learned to embrace the silent-but-present mantra.
Found you through your Graham Pardun interview which introduced me to him as well.