Funny thing about the spiritual discipline of silence. The more we say about it, the less we have of it. But here I go anyway, creating sentences and paragraphs to talk about the lack of them.

Some years back I started to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of words coming at me. And I think I have a high tolerance for words, having worked as a librarian and as a preacher of the Word. There was something else going on. This coincided with what I see now was a bend in the trail of my spiritual pilgrimage.

I have pretty much always tended to the quiet side of life. But I’ve also slowly been shedding much of the external noise in my life. We don’t have a television. We don’t constantly stream shows online. There is no radio always playing in the background. Or in the car. I have no earbuds. I no longer commute 25 miles one way in city traffic (or, actually, any distance at all), and stopped downloading podcasts while I was still making those daily drives. Quieting all that external noise was the easiest part.

Another level of the walk into spiritual silence comes by silencing the social media that invade our lives and that we eagerly, and perhaps mindlessly, consume. These applications are craftily designed to draw us back in again and again. It takes an effort of the will to wean away from them. Sometimes it takes deleting the apps altogether. A the very least they need to be cordoned off so they don’t invade the life spaces you want to protect. This work is harder than the first.

But hardest of all, and in the end perhaps the most promising, is quieting the internal noise. Some people, I’ve read, don’t have much of an internal dialog constantly running in their heads. Perhaps they subsist on the “earworm” sounds of pop songs, commercial jingles, and repetitive thoughts or ruminations. I’m not one of those people. My mental space has been swept clear of much of those songs and jingles through turning off the tv and radio. What I contend with are snippets of conversations that I have had, or might have, or could yet had; or paragraphs that could end up as the written word somewhere (I’ve written and re-written whole sermons in my head while out walking). Bringing these internally-cultivated words to heel is the hard but necessary work of the spiritual discipline of silence.

Why is it necessary?

To leave space for God to enter into conversation with us.

Much, way too much, of prayer can be described as simply asking for stuff. Prayers for healing. Prayers for comfort while mourning. Prayers that violence in our streets will end. Prayers that people no longer suffer. Prayers for a job. Prayers for food and clean water. Prayers for reconciliation. All prayers asking for something.

True, Jesus himself told us “Ask and it will be given to you” (Matt. 7:7) and St. Paul urged us to “Let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:7). We need to ask. If only to clarify in our own hearts what it is we are seeking, it helps to put it into words, to spell it out. It helps to get specific. And that means working through ‘what I am really asking for.’

But we also need to listen for an answer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in 1939 that

“The silence of the Christian is listening silence, humble stillness, that may be interrupted at any time for the sake of humility. It is silence in conjunction with the Word. … There is a wonderful power of clarification, purification, and concentration upon the essential thing in being quiet. This is true as a purely secular fact. But silence before the Word leads to right hearing and thus also to right speaking of the Word of God at the right time. Much that is unnecessary remains unsaid. But the essential and the helpful thing can be said in a few words.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954, p. 80)

Thus spiritual silence is silence with a purpose. We don’t listen for many words. We listen for the Word. And in hearing what the Word has to say directly to each of us at this moment in this place, we can know what to say and do. Because the Word of God has something to say to us as individuals (both the living Word and the printed Word). And because the Word of God gives each of us something to say to others.

The external disciplines of silence, again, are the easy part. Turn off the devices, unplug the gear, go for a walk without your tunes playing in your ears, avoid even conversations. At least for a short space each day, for a half an hour. Or longer if you can.

The harder work is seeking the internal silence that gives our God who so often speaks to his children in a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12) his chance to get a word in edgewise. Just sit with God for a while. Maybe imagine you’re on a porch swing together, just silently watching fireflies rise up out of the grass at the end of a long summer day. Then stop imagining the lawn and the fireflies. And just sit together. In silence.

Yes, sometimes the Lord does call to us in thunder and loud brass instruments (Ex. 19:16). He grabs our attention away from ourselves. He shakes us up and wakes us up. But that really isn’t his voice for the day-to-day. Think about how parents will holler loudly to catch their child’s attention from the other side of a playground. But then think about how a loving parent will not holler and shout at close range and indoors. God does holler at us sometimes to get our attention. But he usually uses his ‘indoor voice’ with us. Especially when we are close by. And we want to be close by to God.

Sitting with God in silence – often, regularly, literally – is a spiritual discipline that clears the way for the Word of God in our lives.

Two perennially basic elements of a spiritual life seem to be silence and solitude. And not just in Christianity. A lot of people have written about them over the centuries. And a lot of Christians have practiced these spiritual disciplines. Based on that alone, I think it’s worth spending some time considering them.

They are disciplines that are commonly linked with each other. They work together.

I write, I should tell you, as one who is convinced of the value of silence and solitude. And I write this on a day when we have a crew of house-painters clambering over the house as they chat and joke and whistle and shout to each other, as their boss gives directions and they respond, as their ladders clump against the house and as their footsteps thump across the porch roof so that they can paint the second story. This is also a day when a plumber is in and out of the house, working to open a clogged drain that defeated my best efforts and very minimal plumbing skills. And, finally, this is also a day I pushed a noisy, vibrating lawnmower around our property for a couple hours. My day has not been silent. I have not been hidden away from other people.

But it’s also a day that I started in silence and solitude, therefore a day in which I have renewed my side of the relationship the Lord has with me (something I need to do constantly). That means this is a day in which I carry a living awareness of my God with me. Thomas Merton spoke to the valuable and pervasive and persistent nature of these two disciplines in a small book titled “Thoughts in Solitude” (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958).

Of silence he wrote: “When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively, no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.” (page 91)

Of solitude: “As soon as a man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be–in the country, the monastery, the woods or the city.” (p. 96)

There is, he is saying, a gracious freedom that is rooted in these prayer disciplines, a freedom that carries over in space-time wherever and whenever a disciple goes. “My whole life becomes a prayer” (not just those minutes spent with folded hands and closed eyes). I am “with God no matter where [I] may be” (not just while in church or Bible study or other ministry activity).

If the image of the Christian life as pilgrimage works for you as it does for me, perhaps it will help to think of silence and solitude as the two sides of the path. On a hiking trail the exact edges are usually not clearly specific. The path blends out into the forest floor; the moss and fallen branches, the leaf litter and wildflowers blend back into the treadway. But the edges do define the difference between path and not-path. So, I think that guided both by solitude and by silence we can make our way along the spiritual pilgrimage of our lives. We may make our way without paying these disciplines any direct attention (as you can hike without concentrating on the edges of the trail). But I’d suggest that if we try to live without any silence and without any solitude, we will eventually find ourselves completely off the spiritual path, trying to bushwhack our way to our goal. It can be done, but it’s harder.

Keeping to the spiritual path is an intermediate goal that helps us along the way to God. Some days it’s easier than other days. Today it hasn’t been particularly easy. But, despite the disruptions of painters and plumber and push-mower, my heart rests in the peace that passes all understanding.

These disciplines are things I will be exploring in further posts. There are aspects of these simple-sounding spiritual tools that I think I can share, things that might make it easier for you to enjoy them too. Or at least, perhaps you will come to understand why some believers believe that paying attention to silence and solitude are vitally important.

David Benner seems to dash a founding idea of these spirituality blog posts when he writes:

“When applied to the spiritual life, the metaphor of a journey is both helpful and somewhat misleading. Helpfully it reflects the fact that the essence of spirituality is a process–specifically, a process of transformation. Unhelpfully it obscures the fact that we are already what we seek and where we long to arrive–specifically, in God. Once we realize this, the nature of the journey reveals itself to be more one of awakening than accomplishment, more one of spiritual awareness than spiritual achievement.” David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself. Expanded ed. (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books, 2015), page 3.

Like so many other things, Benner points out, the metaphor of spiritual pilgrimage is a coin with two sides. Yes, it can be helpful; but not always and not in every detail.

I tend to find it more helpful than not. So let me speak about his objection that “it obscures the fact that we are already what we seek and where we long to arrive–specifically, in God.” This is true. But only, or especially, for people who are believers. There are others who do not (yet?) believe. They are seeking Him yet. Perhaps in unhelpful way or in unhelpful places. But seeking nonetheless. In seeking, they are on a journey to a place and to the One they do not know.

Believers, on the other hand, are clearly “already … where we long to arrive.”

So how can we use the ‘spiritual life as pilgrimage’ metaphor if we are already where we want to be, that is, close to God or even in God?

First, we say that the seekers – while already in God in a sense – are still ‘on the road’ to that place where they can finally see that God is as close as their own skin.

But, second, I believe we can also say that believers in God are still themselves ‘on the road’ as they seek a deeper and richer relationship with God. God is by definition vast, immense, huge, without boundaries of either time or extent. So there is really no way to be outside of, away from, or distant from God. But at times we may not recognize or feel how close God is. That does not mean He isn’t close. Acts 17:27 tells us that God “is actually not far from each one of us.”

So we can think of the continuing spiritual pilgrimage of believers as an exploration quest. We are engaged in poking around, sounding out, mapping, discovering for ourselves (and others, maybe) all the heights, the depths, the north-east-south-and-west of the unending beautiful landscape we call God. It’s as if we have the freedom to explore an entire continent on foot; we can never exhaust the possibilities.

That is the spiritual life I write about. That is the function of the various spiritual disciplines I want to explore. Benner is quite right that this pilgrim life is neither accomplishment nor achievement. It is not something we do or grasp or win. It is a gift we receive. It is who and what we are.

Besides all that, speaking as a long distance hiker, the metaphor strikes me as full of nuggets to mine.