a silent hope.

so i thought i would share with you some of my writings from college from time to time. hope you enjoy. this one is from a paper i wrote for my Theories of Rhetoric & Communication course...

Turn off the music. Shut down the computer. Or turn off the television. Take a walk through the forest. Do not speak, but simply listen. Can you hear it? The silence? What does it reveal? What is it calling you to do? How do you respond? What power lies within the silence? What of silence in conversation? In moments of pain and heartache? How can we cultivate a silent hope?

I do not allow for silence enough or perhaps it is that I do not engage with or entertain the silence. I listen to music or I talk with my friends or even talk to myself. I too often neglect to “quiet down my busy mind to find a hiding place.” I think to some degree silence makes me uncomfortable, and I am not sure what to do with it. I suppose I am not alone here. We are cultured to think that silence is bad or awkward or just dead air because we live in a noisy and busy world. The silence is often polluted with this noise, with ceaseless talking and with little to no regard for its power. Thomas Merton writes, “it is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business and our noise: these are an illusion” (257). The noise seems to overtake us and consume our very lives. We go about all our business in a noisy hurry and rarely simply stop and quiet our hearts, our minds, our lives. We seldom put forth the time and energy to “practice the quieter virtues” (to barrow a phrase from Greg Spencer). If the silence of the world is reality, then we must seek to reclaim that reality. We must learn to be silent. We must come to respect the power of the silence and appreciate the quiet. “When we no longer walk in the presence of the Lord, we cannot be living reminders of his divine presence in our lives” (Nouwen, 29). Christ dwells in the “secret and the quite place—in the stillness he is there.” We must meet him there. “After that we go forth to find Him in solitude. There we communicate with Him alone, without words, without discursive thoughts, in the silence of our whole being” (Merton, 254).

There seems to be a beautiful and interesting connection between silence and hope. “If we fill our lives with silence, then we live in hope, and Christ lives in us and gives our virtues much substance” (Merton, 259). In order to live in hope, we must also live in silence. Let us consider hope in some more depth. Hope. Seems like such a simple word, yet in the four letters lies an immensity of meaning and significance. Hope is strongly connected to others. We must have hope in others and that hope empowers those around us. For, “our tongues are the keys that open heaven to others” (Merton, 254). It means being able to find a glimmer of hope in someone, something, and in ourselves that we are worthy and are His beloved. It is fully and whole-heartedly believing that He who began a good work in us will be faithful to complete it. That no matter how discouraged, unworthy, and insignificant we feel, He will finish the work that He has started in us. Yet it is so easy to let the world and others stifle that hope. We can so easily ‘stuck’. But the wonderful thing is that this hope can and will be restored. Because not only do we have a hope in the present but we also have a hope of an eternal future in Christ. I am reminded of the lyrics to the Avalon song “In A Different Light.”

Don't cry for me
No, I've never been one to shoulder the weight of the world
'Cause I believe
This is here and it's now, but it's not my home
There's a hope beyond what my eyes can see
And there's a place that He's preparing for me

Don't be afraid
Of the twists and the turns of the road that we're on, just believe
There'll come a day
When our faith turns to sight, and we'll see His face
While we're here the heartache's hard to ignore
So for now, we'll keep our eyes on the Lord

Knowing that everything is going to be alright in my eternal life seems to dim the despair of failure and allows for me to see things in a “different way, in a different light.” We must keep our eyes on Jesus and remember the beautiful promise of hope we have from our Lord.

Silence is often required in conversation. If we are to listen, we must first be silent—this is the case in both our conversations with God and with others. Sometimes people need us to simply listen, let them vent, get it out or tell their story. All too often people do not have anyone who just listens. Stories go untold, lives go unshared and conflicts go unresolved all as a result of a lack of silence. “Storytelling is as much for an other as it is for oneself” (Frank, 19). Stories must be told and heard.

Silence has power in moments of pain, heartache and tragedy. One of my friends from high school was killed after she went missing in a snowstorm nearly two years ago. It was one of the most painful moments in my life when I heard that her body had been found—that meant that she had actually died and there was no longer anymore hope for survival. It was over. I had hope that she would be found alive, but now it was gone, non-exist. There were no words to be said—just tears to be cried and weeping family and friends to be held. Silence. It was a cold yet warm silence—a silence pregnant with confusion, pain, hurt, agony yet with faith, love and a glimmer of hope. Hope for what? Well, perhaps it was an unsaid hope that something good could come out of this trying situation and somehow God would be glorified. I cannot say that I myself had that glimmer of hope in the moment or for many weeks afterward. I wanted to, but I was too paralyzed, too exhausted, too frozen. The silence was what I needed—what we all needed. All that we could do is let the silence be and let the quiet calm our hearts and minds. We had to give the silence the space to heal, to mend the wounds, and to revive our hope in an eternal future. We had to be still and know that he was God.

Works Cited:

Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Merton, Thomas. No Man Is An Island. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

Nouwen, Henri J.M. The Living Reminder. San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1977.