The Silent Way

The way out, at least for me, was to engage the humble work of silence and rid myself of what E.M. Forster called “poor little talkative Christianity.”

Rowan Williams poses the question: “Isn’t one of our most pressing problems at the moment the commodification of ‘spiritual experiences’ in a commodity-obsessed culture?”

Williams speculates parenthetically in the foreword to Maggie Ross’s brilliant work, Silence: A User’s Guide. The question seems like an offhanded throw-in, perhaps inspired by the theme of silence Ross is introducing to the reader. Prior to the thought-provoking question Williams riffs about the conundrum of articulating an experience with the Divine. In fact, he claims, when we try we often run the risk of “real self-deception and fantasy.” 

Such is the paradox of experiencing God. God’s nature is communal and God’s nature is intimate and God’s nature is love. When one knows such things via a “spiritual experience” the inclination is to seek to describe it. However, silence, in the form of mindful reflection, might be the only honest option. 

It is not a revelation to claim our Western world is noisy, prone to an excess of sound. In the case of spiritual experiences, language reigns in a quest to describe and cultivate an encounter with the Spirit of God. I came of pastoral age in the era of “butts, budgets, and buildings.” Each Sunday, in order to be sensitive to the seeker, was a clash of good faith evangelicalism and a hamster wheel of can we top last week? We even adjusted language to service the worshipful experience. Join us for our Sunday Worship Experience, we’d say. As if we could massage a spiritual experience with a touch more sound, a few more words, and some flashing lights. 

Not. A. Single. Second. Of. Silence.

This cycle needed each week to be bigger and better than the week before. It served only as an attempt to deliver spiritual experiences. The whole pastoral practice was a charade in pleasing some invisible collective of new people with the latest moment of “meaningful” manipulation. We even tricked ourselves. 

I left this world of commodifying spiritual experiences a handful of years ago and in the most recent of years the scales have fallen from my eyes (and are still falling). A spiritual experience void of silence, or what Ross has referred to as “the mind of Christ,” becomes exactly what Williams warns of: a real self-deception and fantasy.

The way out, at least for me, was to engage the humble work of silence and rid myself of what E.M. Forster called “poor little talkative Christianity.” It seems the tension of the present day is how to propose a wide-ranging communal healing without falling into a foray of critique laden language in which I refuse to begin in a silent stillness, rooted in the love of God. 

Quieter deception is not silence, it is still deception. 

Perhaps the turning point, the metanoia if you will, was only possible when the sound was turned off and, heeding the words of the desert dwellers from over a millennia prior, I sat in the cell of my heart. For as they said, “sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” 

The embrace of silence was the spiritual experience I had been looking for. A gentle whisper wafted into my heart and stirred my feet. Since then I’ve found the language, and the doing, of my life flows from roots more prone to grow the fruit of shalom, rather than the deceptive fantasy I was taught to commodify. 

I have chosen the Silent Way.